It's a tall order to read through all of our juicy updates with one less hour this weekend ☀️⏰. Welcome to the March 2025 release notes!

Places Highlights

Major category_tags enhancements for eat/drink/accommodation Places 🍽🍸🏨
SEVEN new rich attributes for eat/drink/accommodation Places 🎉
+6.3 million Places and +9.9 million Places with Geometry 📈 🌎

Category_tags Enhancements

After years of feedback and fixes, we are thrilled to release an enhanced version ofcategory_tags! 🎉 The following only applies to places where naics_code like '72%' (Accommodation and Food Services). Enhanced category_tags for additional categories to be expected in future releases.

Refined Definition

Less noise and a strong opinion about what category_tags aims to answer.

❌Old Definition: An array of descriptive tags indicating higher-resolution category information.
✅New Definition: An array of alphabetically ordered values describing the granular category, and/or cuisine, and/or common dish/good for a place.
- See docs for granular category, cuisine, and common dish/good examples.

Per this refined definition, some previously existing category_tag values saw a slight textual change, moved to a new amenity column with a better fitting definition, or deprecated entirely. See here for a complete mapping of all previously existing values with a change in the March 2025 release.

More Data

+9M (+108%!) category_tag values assigned to POIs globally where naics_code like '72%.' 📈
+100 new, sensical, category_tag values tailored to common user queries 🔥
- See here for the universe of possible values for places where naics_code like '72%'

More Structure

Interpret when category_tags are sub-values of other category_tags through our published hierarchy here.

New Rich Attributes (Amenity Columns)

To complement enhanced category_tags, we are excited to release 7 new "amenity" attributes that capture other relevant facts and features about a place! Like category_tag enhancements, these columns are only available for places where naics_code like '72%' (Accommodation and Food Services). Additional categories to be expected in future releases.

Our goal for amenity columns is to 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.

Accessibility: "How can I get there and am I able to get around there?"
Activities: "What can I do while I’m there?"
Amenities: "What things do they offer to use while I’m there?"
Owner Demographic: "What type of people run this place?"
Payment Options: "How can I pay for things there?"
Service Options: "What kind of meals do they serve, what are my options, and how can I get it?"
Setting: "How will it look, feel, and sound while I’m there?"

Please reach out to sales or your CSM to learn more, and let us know which category to pursue next!

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 64,627,390, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 6,366,832 places from last month. The net increase is mainly attributed to large new sources aimed at increasing coverage in Brazil, Italy, and a handful of other countries.

Global Coverage Gains

This month, coverage gains were primarily focused around Brazil and Italy for customers with urgent needs. Hundreds of categories were in scope, and some notabletop_categories saw the following lift:

Brazil: +4.27M POIs 🇧🇷
- naics_code like '8121%' (Personal Care Services): +503,365 POIs 💇‍♀️💆‍♂️
- naics_code like '7225%' (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +408,379 POIs 🍽
- naics_code like '8131%' (Religious Organizations): +265,565 POIs ⛪️
- naics_code like '4481%' (Clothing Stores): +260,103 POIs 👕
- naics_code like '7224%' (Drinking Places (Alcoholic Beverages)): +211,620 POIs 🍸
Italy: +1.37M POIs 🇮🇹
- naics_code like '8121%' (Personal Care Services): +69,000 POIs 💇‍♀️💆‍♂️
- naics_code like '4451%' (Grocery Stores): +62,083 POIs 🛒
- naics_code like '8131%' (Religious Organizations): +61,864POIs ⛪️
- naics_code like '7225%' (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +55,288 POIs 🍽
- naics_code like '7224%' (Drinking Places (Alcoholic Beverages)): +52,449 POIs 🍸

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

Geometry Improvements

We don't want our polygon-centric customers to miss out on all this new data! We parlayed our places coverage increase with new geometry sources that yielded +9.9M POIs with a polygon. These sources cover more than just Brazil and Italy, and the following countries saw the largest boost:

Brazil: +5,714,533 POIs with a polygon 🇧🇷
Italy: +2,883,215 POIs with a polygon 🇮🇹
Mexico: +860,443 POIs with a polygon 🇲🇽
Argentina: +106,658 POIs with a polygon 🇦🇷
Germany: +85,639 POIs with a polygon 🇩🇪

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 38 brands across 24 countries including:

Krasnoe&Beloe (SG_BRAND_45d995202257e71d) with 18,052 POIs 🥃
Meritage Homes (SG_BRAND_2e752a107d8f97e9) with 352 POIs 🏡
Giraffas (SG_BRAND_c4bf82ebbd3a939f) with 305 POIs 🍽
San Diego County Credit Union (SG_BRAND_efec01986f8171e1) with 39 POIs 💵
Burgez (SG_BRAND_e01467ff9240fa81) with 15 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 2,008 brands with at least one store closure in January 2025 and 1,793 brands with at least one store opening in January 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 2,419,133 Placekeys (46,910 branded and 2,372,223 non-branded).