We took advantage of February's extra day and are "leaping" into March with heaps of new data! 🥳

Places Highlights

• +1,706,887 POIs globally
• Polygon spring cleaning 🧼 ⭔
• +102 new brands across 53 countries

Places Growth

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month, SG Places has a grand total of 54,547,532, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 1,706,887 places from last month.

Italy Gains 🇮🇹

We on-boarded a series of new sources to boost our Italian coverage of non-branded POIs, and these efforts yielded a whopping +1,346,675 (+126%) Italian Places! 🤌 The top_categories with largest increases include:

• naics_code like '7225%' (Restaurants and Other Eating Places) with +183,925 POIs 🍝
• naics_code like '8121%' (Personal Care Services) with +89,974 POIs 💆
• naics_code like '7211%' (Traveler Accommodation) with +89,001 POIs

US Gains 🇺🇸

We also revised some ingest rules for a few US sources in efforts to capture more real and open POIs, and this effort yielded +229,833 US Places. Sizable increases can be seen in the following top_categories:

• naics_code like '7121%' (Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions) with +63,599 POIs 🏛
• naics_code like '8121%' (Personal Care Services) with +37,856 POIs 💆
• naics_code like '7139%' (Other Amusement and Recreation Industries) with +30,951 POIs ⛷

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

Geometry Improvements

We have been making efforts to decrease the number of "shared" polygons across prominent retail brands 🛍🛒. We measure this by tracking and attempting to maximize the percent of POI that have polygon_class = "OWNED_POLYGON." In this release, several brands saw substantial increases in the percent of their polygons that are now “owned”, including:

• Advance Auto Parts (+11% up to 99%)
• CVS (+11% up to 98%)
• Walgreens (+9% up to 97%)
• Ashley Furniture HomeStore (+25% up to 94%)
• Dollar Tree (+19% up to 98%)

We have also taken major efforts to clean up redundant, messy polygons 🧼. For a subset of mall and airport POIs, the malls/airports and their tenant POIs previously shared several distinct but highly overlapping polygons. These polygons have now been deduplicated, so that the malls are represented by a single polygon; any tenants inside the malls either have their own unique polygon or share the mall’s polygon.

Example: The top image shows the polygons representing Providence Place Mall (zzw-222@62k-jfx-vj9) and some of its tenants from the February release; there are several, nearly identical overlapping polygons. The bottom image shows the single, corrected polygon for the mall in the March release.

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 1,863 brands with at least one store closure in January 2024 and 1,650 brands with at least one store opening in January 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 184,331 Placekeys (59,159 branded and 125,172 non-branded).