Welcome to the June 2023 Release Notes! ☀️🍉🕶️⛱️
Like summer, this release is coming in hot!
(2023-05-30/1685001609 shipped on 2023-06-01)

Highlights

• +3.8M new POIs across the globe 🌎
  • Including big leaps in the US 🇺🇸 and Europe 🇪🇺
• +495 new brands across 129 countries 🌐
• New website attribute providing individual POI URLs 🖥️
• Improved Urban Polygons in NY, LA and SF 🏙️

Places

Enhancements

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month SG Places has a grand total of 47,008,946, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI and parking lots. This is a net increase of 3,832,722 places from last month, including:

Growth in the US 🇺🇸

We added +1,901,143 POI in the US, including:

• Offices of Lawyers (541110) with +591,755 POI ⚖️
• Services to Buildings and Dwellings (5617) with +321,629 POI 🧹
  This category includes exterminators, landscapers, janitorial and other cleaning services.
• Residential Remodelers (236118) with +137,120 POI 🏡
• Full-Service Restaurants (722511) with +55,687 POI 🍽️
• Hair, Nail and Skin Care Services (81211) with +48,596 POI 💅
• Automotive Repair (8111) with +23,408 POI 🚙
• Clothing Stores (4481) with +14,140 POI 🧥

Growth in Europe 🇪🇺

We added over 1.9M POI across Europe, including:

• +326,965 in DE 🇩🇪
• +307,705 in PL 🇵🇱
• +265,645 in FR 🇫🇷
• +161,601 in ES 🇪🇸
• +160,294 in IT 🇮🇹
• +103,915 in TR 🇹🇷

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

website and domains Attributes 🖥️

We know the websites and URLs associated with POI are critically important for many use cases including Local Search. In this release, we've improved our handling of that website metadata to provide more specificity. To do so we have (1) renamed the existing websites column to domains and (2) introduced a new column called website.

(1) Renaming the websites column to domains:
The existing websites column has been renamed to domains. This column has always been an array of 0-or-more top-level web domains corresponding to the POI, so this new name more accurately reflects the data being provided. Besides the new name, the column remains otherwise unchanged.

(2) New column website:
We've introduced a new column to the SafeGraph Places dataset called website. This is a string column containing a single web URL to the specific POI’s publicly available website. For the June 2023 release, this column will only contain data for a subset of branded POIs (ie, POIs with a safegraph_brand_id assigned). In future releases, coverage will expand to include non-branded POIs.

To illustrate the improvement, here's an example of the values for the domains and new website attributes for a specific Stop & Shop in CT:

You can find additional details on these columns on our Doc Site.

Brands

We've added a grand total of 495 brands across 129 countries. Some of the highlights:

Notable brands 🌍

• Progressive (SG_BRAND_71e3e53192f6992d) with 26,843 POI 🚗🚤🏍️
• McCafé (SG_BRAND_b3ae879e212d623c) with 3,623 POI ☕️
• Societe Generale (SG_BRAND_76ffed38f13b443c) with 3,077 POI 🏦

👀 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 1,854 brands with at least one store closure in April 2023 and 2,009 brands with at least one store opening in April 2023:
  Learn more about our open/close columns here

Categories

The POI we've added this month span a wide range of categories, including the following additions:

• POI with geometry:
  • Offices of Lawyers (541110) with +647,674 POI ⚖️
  • Services to Buildings and Dwellings (5617) with +366,855 POI 🧹
  • Residential Remodelers (236118) with +142,634 POI 🏡
• Point-only POI:
  • Couriers and Express Delivery Services (492110) with +11,971 POI 📨
  • Commercial Banking (522110) with +7,109 POI 🏧
  • Other Gasoline Stations (447190) with +1,018 POI 🔌

Drops ⬇️

We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 335,458 Placekeys (44,054 branded and 291,404 non-branded).

Other Updates

Park Merge Improvements

With this release, we've improved the way we handle parks and their underlying POI. Where we previously may have merged many entities into one overarching "park", we are now calling out as many underlying POI as possible to allow for improved discovery.

In the below example, instead of just one "Kelly Recreation Complex", we also now include a POI for the Gandy Pool and the EV charging station.

Geometry

Urban Polygon Improvements

As part of the June release, we significantly improved one of the inputs we use to build our Geometry product - building footprints. These include totally updated footprints for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Of course, we use these building footprints to then get even more precise with our Geometry product, building out tenant-specific (aka suite level) polygons. Here are a couple examples of the improvements: