🎁 Unwrapping our December release… a tidy bundle of fixes and features to keep your workflows merry and bright.

Places Highlights

• 238k low-confidence POIs removed to improve data precision 🎯
• Improved category_tags normalization → ~667k category_tags values standardized 🧼
• 106 new brands across 104 countries 🎉

Improved POI Accuracy

We kept chipping away at low-confidence POIs with a focus on hallmark categories (US, non-branded first). As a result, we removed 238k POIs to improve precision. This month we tackled naics_code like 11%, 21%, 22%, 23%, 31%, 32%, 33%, 42%, 48%, 49%, 51%, 53%, 54%, 55%, 56%, 92%. We estimate this removed roughly half of all invalid records in this subset without impacting "real and open" POIs.

Category Tags Normalization

We gave category_tags a seasonal tidy-up: standardized wording, fixed diacritics, aligned singular/plural forms, and normalized conjunctions. Impact: ~667k updated category_tags values this release.

A few examples of what changed:

• Conjunctions → “&”: e.g., Hardware and Tools → Hardware & Tools
• Singular vs. plural (use the canonical form): e.g., Pharmacies → Pharmacy
• Hyphenation & spelling: Nonprofit → Non-profit

Full list of changed category tags [here].

Places Growth

This month, SG Places totals 75,618,538 POIs (including POIs with/without geometry, closed POIs, and parking lots) - a net decrease of 207,634. The decrease comes from our accuracy work as well as other cleanup projects, while we still advanced regular source updates, new brands, and targeted coverage work. Country standouts & top NAICS gains:

• United States: +18k POIs 🇺🇸
  • naics_code = 238990 (Other Specialty Trade Contractors): +10k POIs 🛠️
  • naics_code = 813410 (Civic and Social Organizations): +7k POIs 🏛️
• China: +16k POIs 🇨🇳
  • naics_code = 722513 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +15k POIs 🍔
  • naics_code = 448140 (Clothing Stores): +1k POIs 🛍️
• India: +11k POIs 🇮🇳
  • naics_code = 522110 (Depository Credit Intermediation): +11k POIs 🏦

Of course, you can always visit our Places Summary Stats to find more details on our continued growth.

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 106 brands across 104 countries including:

• Other Motor Vehicle Dealers 🏍️💨
  • Yamaha Motor (SG_BRAND_501a60a2b28ba8e6a95ce30c11877fda) - 2,945 POIs
  • Can-Am (SG_BRAND_22c7ec125c6db25a) - 1,641 POIs
  • NIU (SG_BRAND_dcd71ca6abc64318) - 1,579 POIs
  • Fantic (SG_BRAND_0ea55a3169dd7bc8) - 1,413 POIs
  • Vespa (SG_BRAND_20f0096b671095c8) - 1,307 POIs
• Système U (SG_BRAND_ef7c2f9141893642) - 1,269 POIs 🛒

👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here

Brand Openings and Closings

• We rely on POI metadata to track store openings and closings, and we are especially interested in understanding open/close dates for branded POIs. It can take more than a month to infer open/close dates, so we report brand open/close metrics on a one month delay.
• In this release, we flagged 1,865 brands with at least one store closure in September 2025 and 2,154 brands with at least one store opening in October 2025. Learn more about our open/close columns here.

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 452,087 Placekeys (49,993 branded and 402,094 non-branded).