Some "may-jor" updates to report! Welcome to the May 2025 release notes 💐

Places Highlights

Major lift in US closed POI detection 🎯
Improved accuracy for select "sensitive" POI categories 🎒⛪️🪖
86 new brands across 10 countries 🎉

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 65,714,463, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 574,371 places from last month. The net increase attributed to regular source updates, new brands, and narrow efforts to increase coverage in key categories.

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

Improved Closed Detection for US POIs

Determining whether a POI permanently closed is an evergreen challenge, and we're constantly reviewing new signals and tweaking our methods to boost precision (see here for more on "how" we go about this). This month, we're happy to report a substantial model breakthrough in inferring likely closed signal for US POIs!🕵️‍♀️

373,604 US POIs that were previously open (closed_on is null) as of the April 2025 release are now correctly marked closed (closed_on is not null) in the May 2025 release. For reference, we typically flag ~25k US POIs as newly closed each month, so roughly ~350k of the new closures can be attributed to this one-time, "catch-up." The following US categories saw the largest open to closed toggles:
- naics_code = 621111 (Offices of Physicians (except Mental Health Specialists)): +32,409 closed POIs 🩺
- naics_code = 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants): +17,160 closed POIs 🍽
- naics_code = 7225 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +10,507 closed POIs 🍽
- naics_code = 531210 (Offices of Real Estate Agents and Brokers): +8,583 closed POIs 💼 🏠
- naics_code = 713940 (Fitness and Recreational Sports Centers): +7,605 closed POIs 🏋️‍♀️

Sensitive POI Category Improvements

Recall and accurate metadata are especially important for "sensitive" categories so that our customers can isolate specific sets of POIs and decide whether to include/exclude in particular use cases. This month, we focused our efforts on the following "potentially sensitive" POI scopes.

Colleges, Universities, and Trade Schools (US and Canada)

Categories with largest increase:

naics_code = 611310 (Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools): +34,828 US 🇺🇸 and +435 CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611610 (Fine Arts Schools): +13,273 US 🇺🇸 and +586 CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611519 (Other Technical and Trade Schools): +512 US 🇺🇸 and +102CA 🇨🇦 POIs

Most of the net new college/university POIs are "sub-campus" POIs like "Biomedical Sciences Building" or "Student Center." These are real places worth including in our product, but they typically share the same naics_codeas the single POI reflecting the college/university's "main campus," which can then make isolating the main campus challenging. To help distinguish the "main campus" from a department, building, etc. within, we've added a new value toplace_formatfor colleges! 🏫

If place_format = 'Higher Education' then the POI reflects the entirety of the college/university. This value exists for 7,741 POIs in the US and Canada.
- See more about place_format here, and reach out to your CSM if you'd like to see this in your next delivery!

Schools and School Related Services (US and Canada)

Categories with largest increase:

naics_code = 611691 (Exam Preparation and Tutoring): +3,181 US 🇺🇸 and +1,352 CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611110 (Elementary and Secondary Schools): +169 US 🇺🇸 and +1,629 CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611620 (Sports and Recreation Instruction): +1,508 US 🇺🇸 and +98CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611710 (Educational Support Services): +962 US 🇺🇸 and +191CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611692 (Automobile Driving Schools): +508 US 🇺🇸 and +366CA 🇨🇦 POIs
naics_code = 611630 (Language Schools): +430 US 🇺🇸 and +110CA 🇨🇦 POIs

Places of Worship (US and Canada)

naics_code = 813110 (Religious Organizations): +8,499 US 🇺🇸 and +3,605 CA 🇨🇦 POIs

category_tags further details the following religions/denominations where possible:
- Church
- Mosque
- Hindu Temple
- Synagogues
- Buddhist
- Sikh Temple

US Military Bases (Global)

All public knowledge, US military bases, can now be found where naics_code = 928110 (National Security) and category_tags (which further details the military branch) contains one of the following:

US Army: 116 POIs
US National Guard: 87 POIs
US Air Force: 79 POIs
US Navy: 67 POIs
US Marine Corps: 17 POIs
US Defense Logistics Agency: 6 POIs
US Space Force: 6 POIs

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 86 brands across 10 countries including:

Coinme (SG_BRAND_d734332fd7bf6423) with 17,489 POIs 🏧
Pulte Homes (SG_BRAND_d65d2cab314e2bc8) with 705 POIs 🏡
7 Brew Coffee (SG_BRAND_1158e8b14daa3ed3) with 371 POIs ☕️
Bel-Pol (SG_BRAND_29697f930592eaac) with 126 POIs 🛋
7th Street Burger (SG_BRAND_3d49baebc2f9d966) with 19 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 2,024 brands with at least one store closure in March 2025 and 2,142 brands with at least one store opening in March 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 443,064 Placekeys (55,463 branded and 387,601 non-branded).