If a ghost is created for each bad POI deleted, then we may as well sell tickets to our haunted fortress! Welcome to the October 2025 release notes 👻 🎃

Places Highlights

• Nearly 600k new places globally 🌎
• 122k fake, closed, or duplicate POIs removed from US Data in key categories 🎯
• 47 new brands across 43 countries 🎉

Accuracy

SafeGraph evaluates the quality and completeness of our US POI data on a quarterly basis using two key metrics:

• Coverage Rate: The percentage of real and open SafeGraph POIs compared to the industry standard. In the US, this is Google.
• Real Open Rate: The percent of SafeGraph POIs we claim to be real and currently open compared to those that actually are real and open.

Each quarter, we randomly sample two zip codes (one urban and one rural) to measure our accuracy. This month we're looking at:

• 73160: Oklahoma City, OK - Representative of Urban
• 35010: Alexander City, AL - Representative of Rural

Here's the summary (full breakdown on the Metrics page):

** When coverage rate is >100%, it implies that SafeGraph was measured to have more real and open places than the benchmark (Google) in the given zip code. Check out our Accuracy Metric Methodologies for more detailed info on how we arrived at these calculations.

Interested in a particular zip code for a future measurement? We're taking suggestions!

Improved POI Accuracy

It's only fitting we took some extra swings at POI precision while publishing our quarterly accuracy metrics (see section above). This month, we developed some new heuristics for identifying fake/closed/duplicate records at scale and aimed at "non-branded", US POIs in hallmark categories as a first pass 🎯.

As a result, we removed 122k fake, closed, or duplicate places (94k innaics_code like 72% and 28k in naics_code like 61%). We estimate this removed roughly half of all fake, closed, or duplicate records in this subset without impacting "real and open" POIs. We are motivated to unleash this on the remaining ~20mm non-branded, US POIs throughout Q4 so that "real and open" rates skyrocket come the Q1 2026 accuracy metrics update in January 🚀. Stay tuned!!

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 76,501,517, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 594,042 places from last month 📈. The net increase can be attributed to regular source updates, new brands, and a handful of new sources targeted at specific coverage gains. The following countries and categories saw notable increases:

• Germany: +91k POIs 🇩🇪
  • naics_code = 812112 (Beauty Salons): +4k POIs 💇‍♀️
  • naics_code = 721110 (Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels): +3k POIs 🏨
• France: +78k POIs 🇫🇷
  • naics_code = 721110 (Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels): +5k POIs 🏨
  • naics_code = 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants): +3k POIs 🍴
• China: +45 POIs 🇨🇳
  • naics_code = 721110 (Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels): +11k POIs 🏨
  • naics_code = 522390 (Other Activities Related to Credit Intermediation): +11k POIs 💳 🏦

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

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 47 brands across 43 countries including:

• Banco do Brasil (SG_BRAND_db63d2a1e4af242c) with 37,621 POIs 🏦
• Canara Bank (SG_BRAND_6d90f40d8ef778c1) with 9,523 POIs 🏦
• ICICI Bank (SG_BRAND_9ab7f70f07edb291) with 8,139 POIs 🏦
• Bonpoint (SG_BRAND_1e3d9ff9281c3cf6) with 104 POIs 👚
• Dillons Pharmacy (SG_BRAND_aa6625c400331ac3) with 55 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 1,776 brands with at least one store closure in August 2025 and 2,084 brands with at least one store opening in August 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 328,111 Placekeys (74,059 branded and 254,052 non-branded).