No "June gloom" detected at the SafeGraph HQ - just rays of sunny, new data! Welcome to the June 2025 release notes 😎.

Places Highlights

• +9mm places globally 📈🌎
• Enhancedcategory_tags and amenity columns rolled out to retail POIs! 🛍
• Newname_aliases column available for early testing and feedback 💥

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 74,918,566, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 9,204,103 places from last month. The net increase attributed to refined source updates, new brands, and net new global sources targeted at category specific gains.

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

Global Coverage Gains

This month, we refined our category interpretation for a few large sources, which enabled us to squeeze more "data juice" from the "source fruit." We also focused on closing coverage gaps globally for hotels. As a result, the following countries saw the largest coverage gains in notable categories:

• Brazil: +5mm POIs 🇧🇷
  • naics_code = 811111 (General Automotive Repair): +212k POIs 🚘🔧
  • naics_code = 445110 (Supermarkets and Grocery Stores): +181k POIs 🛒
  • naics_code = 721110 (Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels): +92k POIs 🏨
• Italy: +1.79mm POIs 🇮🇹
  • naics_code = 811111 (General Automotive Repair): +49k POIs 🚘🔧
  • naics_code = 813410 (Civic and Social Organizations): +45k POIs 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
  • naics_code = 541110 (Fitness and Recreational Sports Centers): +32k POIs 🏋️‍♂️
• US: +665k POIs 🇺🇸
  • naics_code = 813410 (Civic and Social Organizations): +62 POIs 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
  • naics_code = 541110 (Offices of Lawyers): +47k POIs🕴🧳
  • naics_code = 445110 (Supermarkets and Grocery Stores): +18k POIs 🛒
• Mexico: +405k POIs 🇲🇽
  • naics_code = 445110 (Supermarkets and Grocery Stores): +48k POIs 🛒
  • naics_code = 721110 (Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels): +27k POIs 🏨
  • naics_code = 453210 (Office Supplies and Stationery Stores): +14k POIs 🖊
• Poland: +244k POIs 🇵🇱
  • naics_code = 721110 (Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels): +34k POIs 🏨
  • naics_code = 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants): +15k POIs 🍽
  • naics_code = 611110 (Elementary and Secondary Schools): +10k POIs 📚

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 162 brands across 51 countries including:

• Carelon Health Care Center (SG_BRAND_72d1c0131a9d16f3) with 799 POIs 🧑‍⚕️
• RWJBarnabas Health (SG_BRAND_bedb03b85dda80a7) with 228 POIs 🧑‍⚕️
• Virsi (SG_BRAND_06239362c56087b6) with 84 POIs ⛽️
• Dirty Dough Cookies (SG_BRAND_73d6c22df3c82141) with 66 POIs 🍪
• True Spec Golf (SG_BRAND_898ebf5e6b2d3ae1) with 39 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 1,924 brands with at least one store closure in April 2025 and 2,170 brands with at least one store opening in April 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 2,779,465 Placekeys (41,436 branded and 2,738,029 non-branded).

Enhanced Category Tags and Amenity Columns for Retail

Retail Category Tags

We’ve continued our work enhancing category_tags, extending the cleaner, more opinionated taxonomy first rolled out for Food & Accommodation (naics_code like '72%') to the Retail Trade universe (naics_code like '44-45%')! 🎉 See docs for more.

Retailcategory_tags now answer a single question:

• “What words or phrases best describe this place, or what type of products does it sell?”
  • All possible values describe granular retail store types (“Department Store”), primary goods (“Auto Parts & Accessories”), or both.

More Data:

• 80 brand-new category_tag values tuned to common search and analytics use-cases 🔍 (universe of possible category_tag values for retail available here)
• +29mm (+257 %) category_tag assignments across retail POIs globally 📈

Retail Amenity Columns

Recall that we released 7 new amenity columns to complement enhanced category_tags for Food & Accommodation (naics_code like '72%'). The same is now true for Retail Trade (naics_code like '44-45%')! 🎉

Our goal for amenity columns remains the same: Answer narrow sets of questions about a place without parsing through noise. See docs for full definitions, but as a guiding rule, each value in an amenity column should be a suitable answer to the column's distinct question.

By the Numbers:

• 25 new amenity column values tuned to common search and analytics use-cases 🔍
• 359k amenity column assignments across retail POIs globally 📈

Name Aliases

Ever had a "we're saying the same thing!" conversation about what seemed to be two totally different places? Do you call your local coffee shop by its old name while transplants call it the updated name under new ownership? Is it "Ashley Furniture" or "Ashley Home Store," and are both correct? 🤔 We all have our own flavor for describing places, and these name differences permeate data sources significantly at scale. This can make recall for place oriented search and data joining especially challenging.

We're working to solve this by storing all alternative names for a given place in a new column called name_aliases. Our goal is to increase match and recall for the desired place from a variety of inputs, including but not limited to: queries for the business name, brand name, store specific name, common colloquial name, or some other “alias” name (see docs for more).

Example:

Do these challenges resonate with your day-to-day data work? We would LOVE to hear from you! We have a foundation of alias data available and are currently narrowing on which types of places and which types of aliases should see more investment. Reach out to your CSM to evaluate a sample of our name_aliases "beta!"