Welcome to the September 2023 Release Notes! 🏫🚌📓
We didn't even realize school was back in session. We just kept adding POIs, especially down under. 🦘🏉🇦🇺
(2023-08-29/1693281746 shipped on 2023-09-01)

Places Highlights

• +538K new POIs across the globe
• +49 new brands across 44 countries 🌐
• Continued Coverage Improvements in AUS 🇦🇺

Accuracy

SafeGraph evaluates the quality and completeness of our US POI data on an ongoing 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 month, we randomly select two zip codes as a method of sampling one urban and one more rural area. This month we're looking at:

• 46204: Indianapolis, IN - Representative of Urban
• 12946: Lake Placid, NY - Representative of Rural

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

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 month? We're taking suggestions!

Growth

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month SG Places has a grand total of 50,382,705, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI and parking lots. This is a net increase of 537,912 places from last month, including:

• +343,392 in AU 🇦🇺
• +139,370 in US 🇺🇸
• +21,962 in FR 🇫🇷
• +27,125 in IN 🇮🇳

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

Australia 🇦🇺

This month, we added what we expect to be the first of many waves of Australia POI. Here's a look at some of the top categories:

• Restaurants and Other Eating Places (7225) with +58,040 🍽️
• Beauty Salons (812112) with +18,325 💇💅
• Clothing and Clothing Accessories Stores (448) with +18,261 👚👕👖
• Offices of Physicians (62111) with +15,553 🩺
• General Automotive Repair (811111) with +9,259 🧑‍🔧🛞

Brands

We've added a grand total of 49 brands across 44 countries. Some of the highlights:

Notable brands

• La Banque Postale (SG_BRAND_4789038a98120dd0) with 13,788 POI 🏦
• Union Bank of India (SG_BRAND_c11a2546bf0a3f33) with 8,032 POI 🏦
• Chow Tai Fook (SG_BRAND_f74750981f489530) with 4,159 POI 💍

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 2,045 brands with at least one store closure in July 2023 and 2,359 brands with at least one store opening in July 2023:
  Learn more about our open/close columns here

Known Issues or Bug Fixes

• Choice Hotels acquired Radisson Americas in June 2022 but only recently completed the integration. As such former Radisson brands (e.g. Park Inn by Radisson, Park Plaza, Radisson, Radisson Blu, Radisson Individuals, Radisson Red) have been marked closed in their respective countries and have new brands under the Choice Hotel parent brand.
• Introduced Bed Bath & Beyond Mexico as a brand for all relevant stores in Mexico. It became an independent brand when its US counterpart closed.
• Donato's Pizza, Burlington, Quick Trip and sweetgreen have increased store counts which are accurate. We addressed an issue in our sourcing pipeline.

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 181,165 Placekeys (41,925 branded and 139,240 non-branded).