We're whipping our data into summer shape! Welcome to the June 2024 release notes. 😎

Places Highlights

• Refined closed_on detection remedies 300k+ global POIs 🚨
• Canonicalized city values for global POIs 🌆
• New Places column differentiating residential vs commercial address now available in the US! 📫

Places Growth

In the June release, SafeGraph has a grand total of 53,003,841 places, including POIs with or without geometry, closed POIs, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 19,221 places from last month. Through some large source updates, the categories and countries with the most net new POIs are:

• naics_code = 722511 (Full Service Restaurants) with +35,249 POIs in the US 🇺🇸 🍔
• naics_code = 5617 (Services to Buildings and Dwellings) with +31,666 POIs in the US 🇺🇸 👨‍🔧
• naics_code = 485119 (Other Urban Transit Systems) with +22,551 POIs in Germany 🇩🇪 🚊

As always, you can visit our Places Summary Stats for more granular metrics.

Refined closed_on Detection

Flagging newly closed POIs is critical to any measure of accuracy, and this month, we refined our global closed_on logic to catch an additional ~317k closed POIs previously (and incorrectly) marked as open. In countries where open/close features are currently supported (see docs for country list), we marked 180k+ POIs with a new closed_on value. In countries where open/close features are not supported, 137k+ closed POIs have been removed from the data. The countries with the largest impacts are:

• iso_country_code = JP where 131k POIs have a new closed_on value 🇯🇵
• iso_country_code = BR where 112k closed POIs are now removed 🇧🇷
• iso_country_code = US where 34k POIs have a new closed_on value 🇺🇸

Global City Canonicalization 🌆

POI metadata like city is often abbreviated, replaced with a town/locality name, or even misspelled. This can be especially ambiguous in countries lacking widely adopted postal standards, which makes data matching and "group by" queries challenging. We applied some heuristics to detect the most obvious outliers and replaced with a more common city value to alleviate this challenge. As a result, ~793k POIs now have a canonicalized city name. Below are a few examples of this improvement:

New Address Column! 📫

Our definition of a place is quite broad, and while we do not capture single family homes as POIs, some POIs operate out of residential addresses. To help our customers differentiate residential vs. commercial addresses (per its country's postal authority), we're debuting land_use_classas our newest address attribute! See docs for details, and contact your customer success manager to learn more.

Brands

We've added a total of 868 brands across 26 countries 🌍 including:

• Araujo (SG_BRAND_7f75f6e07ef9e901) with 302 POIs 🩺 💊
• Richmond Hotels (SG_BRAND_7ceb82216887de3f) with 51 POIs 🏨
• Every (SG_BRAND_c61e71c4522afdc1) with 51 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 1,900 brands with at least one store closure in April 2024 and 1,867 brands with at least one store opening in April 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 1,002,843 Placekeys (183,423 branded and 819,420 non-branded).