Welcome to the February 2024 Release Notes. SafeGraph's Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so we're serving up a blizzard of new data for the rest of winter! 🦫 🎩

Places Highlights

• +1,141,918 POIs globally 🌐
• Continued focus on parent<>child spatial relationships in Geometry ⭔
• +40 new brands across 28 countries 🎊

Places Growth

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month, SG Places has a grand total of 52,840,622, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 1,141,918 places from last month.

US POI Gains

We doubled down on sourcing more non-branded, less prominent POIs in the US to support our search customers, and the latest effort yielded +935,755 US POIs 🇺🇸. Sizable increases can be seen in the following top_categories:

• 7225 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places) with +81,937 POIs 🍔 🍝 ☕ 🍻
• 8134 (Civic and Social Organizations) with +50,152 POIs 👪 🌟
• 5311 (Lessors of Real Estate) with +41,319 POIs 🏢 🏠
• 8111 (Automotive Repair and Maintenance) with +39,304 POIs 🚘 🔧
• 5411 (Legal Services) with +35,877 POIs 📜 👔

Gulf Coast POI Gains

We also wrapped up a project aimed at increasing POI coverage in Gulf Coast countries 🏖. This yielded +129,674 POIs in the United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪 and +75,635 POIs in Bahrain 🇧🇭. Sizable increases can be seen in the following top_categories:

• 7225 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places) with +15,057 POIs 🍔 🍝 ☕ 🍻
• 5239 (Other Financial Investment Activities) with +9,171 POIs 🔢 💸
• 4481 (Clothing Stores) with +8,474 POIs 👕 👜
• 8121 (Personal Care Services) with +6,134 POIs 💇 💆
• 5416 (Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services) with +5,623 POIs 👔

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

Geometry Improvements

We continue to expand our understanding of spatial hierarchy - POIs located within other POIs - and this is reflected in additional gains in the number of “parent/child” relationships we track in our data.

• Child POIs: This month, we report 5,194,977 POIs as “children” of another POI (+4.2% compared to last month). In the US, 29% of POIs overall are considered a child of another POI.
• Parent POIs: This month, we report 826,359 POIs as “parents” of one or more POIs (also +4.2% compared to last month). In the US, 4.4% of POIs overall are considered a parent of another POI.

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 1,764 brands with at least one store closure in December 2023 and 1,989 brands with at least one store opening in December 2023.
  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 128,676 Placekeys (56,720 branded and 71,956 non-branded).