February-2025 Release Notes
With one month down and our New Year's resolutions still in-tact, we humbly welcome you to the February 2025 release notes 🎉.
Places Highlights
A variety of US-centric improvements including:
- More than a million new US places 🇺🇸
- Improved Geometry for major US airports and terminals ✈️
- 30 new US brands 🎉
Places Growth
This month, SG Places has a grand total of 58,260,558, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 1,684,903 places from last month. The net increase is attributed to squeezing more juice from primary US sources, regular source updates, and net new brands.
US Coverage Gains
Sources frequently change how they publish data about a place, and while many changes are trivial, the accumulation over time can cause disruption. This month, we invested in source resilience to adapt to our most fickle, US sources to ensure coverage is always optimized. This effort resulted in +1.62M US places with notable increases in the following key categories:
naics_code= 621111 (Offices of Physicians (except Mental Health Specialists)): +137,884 POIs 👩⚕️👨⚕️naics_code= 531210 (Offices of Real Estate Agents and Brokers): +86,769 POIs 🕴🏠naics_code= 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants): +31,115 POIs 👨🍳🍔🍝naics_code= 611110 (Elementary and Secondary Schools): +28,480 POIs 🏫👩🏫naics_code= 812112 (Beauty Salons): +25,711 POIs 💇♀️💄💅
Of course, you can always visit our Places Summary Stats to find more details on our continued growth.
Geometry Improvements
The polygons in our Geometry product are comprised of building footprints, slices of building footprints, hand drawn polygons, polygons extracted from aerial imagery, etc. For each POI, we attach a polygon that we believe to best reflect the POI's real world footprint. At scale, this can be challenging, and we continuously cycle through categories to clean up outliers (as measured by wkt_area_sq_meters) 🕵️♀️📏.
This month, we focused on major US airports, including the distinct terminals and concourses associated with each airport (all have naics_code = 488119). Many of the terminals and concourses were previously too large and incorrectly shared the same polygon as the airport. As a result, the average wkt_area_sq_meters for US POIs where naics_code = 488119 decreased from ~48k sq meters ➡️ ~36k sq meters, and the percent where polygon_class = 'OWNED_POLYGON' increased from 80% ➡️ 94% 📈.
*Note that terminals and concourses are children of the greater airport POI, and this relationship can be linked using parent_placekey.
Brands
This month, we added a grand total of 31 brands across 3 countries including:
- North American Van Lines Agent (
SG_BRAND_aa287e0f6ffa0e22) with 231 POIs 🚐 - Northwest Self Storage (
SG_BRAND_e0390ae19c0986f6) with 98 POIs 📦 - Veterinary Emergency Group (
SG_BRAND_d1ca7d8c65965451) with 90 POIs 🩺🐶 - Idaho Central Credit Union(
SG_BRAND_8d8a61e779c5f54a) with 63 POIs 💵 - Arrow Bank (
SG_BRAND_dad2faa469364feb) with 37 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 1,711 brands with at least one store closure in December 2024 and 2,094 brands with at least one store opening in December 2024. 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 298,877 Placekeys (76,919 branded and 221,958 non-branded).