New Year's Resolutions: More places; More useful facts about places; Less places fiction. Kicking off the year trending "up and to the right" on all 3! Welcome to the January 2025 release notes 🎉.

Places Highlights

• New rich attribute! 💳
• Sporting and Performance Art venues get a major makeover 🏈🎤🏀 💃⚽️
• 82 new brands spanning 42 countries 🎉

Accuracy

SafeGraph evaluates the quality and completeness of our US POI data on a quarterly basis using two key metrics:

• Coverage Rate: The percentage of real and open SafeGraph POIs compared to the industry standard. In the US, this is Google.
• Real Open Rate: The percent of SafeGraph POIs we claim to be real and currently open compared to those that actually are real and open.

Each quarter, we randomly sample two zip codes (one urban and one rural) to measure our accuracy. This month we're looking at:

• 27603: Raleigh, NC - Representative of Urban
• 59711: Anaconda, MT - Representative of Rural

Here's the summary (full breakdown on the Metrics page):

Check out our Accuracy Metric Methodologies for more detailed info on how we arrived at these calculations.

Interested in a particular zip code for a future measurement? We're taking suggestions!

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 56,575,655, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 45,448 places from last month 📈. No single country saw a large count fluctuation, and the mild net increase is attributed to new brand additions and regular updates of existing sources.

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

New Rich Attribute: MCC

We are excited to introduce a new column to our growing rich attribute stack – mcc! 🎉 This column provides an array of Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) that classify businesses based on the type of goods or services they offer. These codes are widely used across payment ecosystems to categorize, track, and analyze transactions, offering valuable insights into merchant types.

MCCs are a powerful new attribute that can provide additional insight into the features at a POI. Take, for example, a Barnes & Noble located in Lubbock, TX (223-222@5r4-2t6-nqz):

This POI has the obvious MCCs 5942 (Book Store) and 5945 (Hobby, Toy or Game Store), but then has the not so obvious MCC 5814 (Fast Food Restaurant) due to the fact that there is a cafe located and run by the Barnes & Noble on premises. This new column, in addition to our rich attributes category_tags and naics_code, can provide very granular detail into the services and goods offered at a POI (see docs for more details).

Sporting and Performance Art Venues

Inspired by a handful of customer reported issues, we refined the way we source and attribute all stadium, arena, and performing arts related POIs 🏟.

Previously, sporting and performing arts related venues could be found across various naics_codes despite their meaningful differences - most notably in naics_code = 711211 (Sports Teams and Clubs), naics_code = 711212 (Racetracks), and naics_code = 711310 (Promoters of Performing Arts, Sports, and Similar Events with Facilities). To support simpler queries moving forward, we've decided that all sports related venues should be assigned to naics_code = 711211, all racetrack related venues to naics_code = 711212, and all performing arts related venues (concert halls, theaters, event centers, etc.) to naics_code = 711310. In pursuit of this, we added new sources to round out our coverage, and the US, in particular, saw sizable count increases:

• naics_code = 711211 (Sports Teams and Clubs): +4,479 US POIs 🏟
• naics_code = 711212 (Racetracks): +527 US POIs 🏎🏇
• naics_code = 711310 (Promoters of Performing Arts, Sports, and Similar Events with Facilities): +14,726 US POIs 🎙💃

Additionally, these places are now stocked with super detailed category_tags to denote the types of events and/or which sporting leagues are affiliated with each venue. We added 166 distinct new category_tags to naics_code = 711211 and 711212 to capture professional, collegiate, and club affiliations like "The National Basketball Association," "The National Football League," "NCAA Baseball," "IndyCarSeries," etc. Naics_code = 711310 also features 9 new category_tags that more granularly classify "Convention Centers" vs "Opera Houses," etc.

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 82 brands across 42 countries including:

• LBM Advantage (SG_BRAND_ccc4256826f7d40e) with 1,441 POIs ⚒️🏠🧱
• CRH Americas Material (SG_BRAND_9027514460edbc9f) with 1,230 POIs 👷‍♂️🚧
• Lennar Homes (SG_BRAND_cf3e87361095e7d4) with 856 POIs 🏘
• Arc'teryx (SG_BRAND_e0f92a57c4da9981cf6fa13864393714) with 123 POIs 🧥👕🧣
• The Great Greek Grill (SG_BRAND_da94b30ec279fcf1) with 67 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 1,759 brands with at least one store closure in November 2024 and 2,301 brands with at least one store opening in November 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 197,178 Placekeys (61,425 branded and 135,753 non-branded).