New year, new places: January’s data refresh is officially live. ✨

Places Highlights

• Hospital classification upgrades → improved NAICS categories and added new Department tag to distinguish main hospitals from on-campus units (clinics, ER, etc) 🏥
• Brand improvements → filled missing locations, tightened open/closed accuracy, and clarified store types ✅
• 34 new brands across 52 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:

• 95054: Santa Clara, CA - Representative of Urban
• 80498: Silverthorne, CO - Representative of Rural

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

** When coverage rate is >100%, it implies that SafeGraph was measured to have more real and open places than the benchmark (Google) in the given zip code. 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!

Hospital Classification Improvements

We improved our classification of healthcare POI to better identify major hospitals. We reviewed 78k POI classified in the NAICS 622% category (Hospitals) and applied the updates below:

• Improved classification of 51k POI to NAICS healthcare categories outside of 622% (Hospitals)
• New total NAICS 622%: 27k POIs. To separate major hospitals from departments/clinics in NAICS 622%, we introduced a new category_tag= Department where appropriate.
  • With Department tag: ~9k → part of a hospital/system but not the primary hospital POI (e.g., Emergency Department, Radiology, Outpatient Clinic).
  • Without Department tag: ~18k → likely the main hospital entities.

This refinement makes it easier to identify true hospital locations while still keeping related on-campus services visible. 🏥

Brand Improvements

We gave brands a New Year tune-up: filled missing locations, tightened open/closed accuracy, and clarified store types so your rollups match reality. You’ll now see cleaner distinctions like Crocs vs. Crocs Outlet and Dairy Queen Treat Only vs. Dairy Queen Food & Treat - better analytics, better routing, fewer mismatches. 🎯

What changed (high level):

• Backfilled gaps for select brands (added missing locations).
• Corrected stale open/close signals.
• Split ambiguous brand labels into clear format variants (e.g., outlet vs. full-line).

Places Growth

This month, SG Places totals 75,541,455 POIs (including POIs with/without geometry, closed POIs, and parking lots) - a net decrease of 77,083. 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 Kingdom: +9k POIs 🇬🇧
  • naics_code = 722513 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +2k POIs 🍔
  • naics_code = 722410 (Drinking Places (Alcoholic Beverages)): +7k POIs 🍺
• South Korea: +3k POIs 🇰🇷
  • naics_code = 722513 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +3k POIs 🍔
• Mexico: +3k POIs 🇲🇽
  • naics_code = 447110 (Gasoline Stations): +2k 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 total of 34 brands across 52 countries including:

• Opel (SG_BRAND_57e90dc5df362416) - 1,740 POIs
• Aprilia (SG_BRAND_0721217f7678dc5a15d30d3ba213675e) - 1,446 POIs
• Lotteria GRS (SG_BRAND_bbb2f7e016262419) - 1,183 POIs
• Frank Burger (SG_BRAND_9106a20f42fa5867) - 582 POIs
• Gilera (SG_BRAND_519c0c3eee984684) - 519 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 1,967 brands with at least one store closure in September 2025 and 2,412 brands with at least one store opening in November 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 465,425 Placekeys (36,939 branded and 428,486 non-branded).