Global POI Data at Scale: Inside SafeGraph Global Places

Every market runs on its own point of interest (POI) data. A retailer expanding into a dozen countries might work with one vendor in the US, a different one in Germany, a government open dataset in Japan, and nothing reliable in several others. Each source uses its own schema, its own categories, and its own update schedule, so before any real cross-market analysis can start, a data science team has to spend weeks reconciling formats that were never built to fit together.

Global POI data solves that by putting every country under one schema. SafeGraph Global Places extends the same Places dataset used across North America and the UK to branded locations worldwide. This article covers what global POI data actually is, what’s inside SafeGraph’s version of it, and how retail, real estate, and investment teams put it to work.

What Is Global POI Data?

Point of interest (POI) data describes real-world places: their name, address, coordinates, category, and operating status. Global POI data applies that same schema and quality standard across every country instead of just one. Instead of sourcing a different vendor per market, teams get a single dataset with consistent columns, consistent categorization logic, and a consistent update cadence, no matter which country they’re looking at.

Data scientists, real estate analysts, and investment researchers reach for global POI data whenever a question crosses a border: comparing store formats across regions, tracking a brand’s international footprint, or building a model that needs to treat every market the same way. SafeGraph Places is the foundation this global coverage is built on.

The Problem with Country-by-Country POI Sources

POI data quality and availability vary enormously from country to country. Most markets have a local vendor, if they have one at all, each with a different schema, a different refresh cycle, and a different definition of what even counts as a “place.” Stitching these sources together is slow, manual work, and the problems compound the moment that data needs to feed a model or support a cross-market comparison.

Consider a retail chain evaluating expansion across twelve countries. One market’s vendor might refresh quarterly and use a proprietary category system; another might have no structured POI source at all, forcing the team to build one by scraping store locators by hand. By the time all twelve datasets are cleaned, deduplicated, and mapped to a common schema, the analysis window has often closed, and the earliest data is already stale again.

That’s the hidden cost of country-by-country sourcing. Global POI data doesn’t fail to exist, it’s that assembling it in-house consumes the very time and budget the analysis was supposed to save.

Inside SafeGraph Global Places

What’s included

Every record in SafeGraph Global Places carries the same core attributes as SafeGraph’s flagship Places dataset: location name, street address, latitude and longitude, brand and category classification, phone number and hours of operation, and opened or closed status. A companion brand info file adds stock ticker and exchange, along with which countries a brand currently has open or closed locations in, useful for tying store-level data directly to financial reporting.

SafeGraph currently tracks more than 15,000 brands across roughly 900 categories, with new brands added on an ongoing basis (recent additions include names like Correos, Chagee, and 99 Speedmart). The full column-by-column breakdown, including which fields are premium versus standard, is available in the Places data schema.

One schema, every country

The advantage of Global Places isn’t just breadth, it’s consistency. Every country uses the same category taxonomy, the same open/closed logic, and the same column structure, so a query built for US data works the same way against Spanish or Brazilian data. That consistency removes the cleaning and reconciliation work that normally eats into a cross-market analysis, and it means a model trained on one region can be applied to another without rebuilding the pipeline.

Coverage depth still varies by market. SafeGraph organizes countries into tiers, from heavily invested markets with dense, near-complete coverage down to markets where only major global brands are currently represented, so it’s worth checking a target market’s tier before scoping an analysis.

How Organizations Use Global POI Data

Three use cases come up most often: site selection, competitive intelligence, and investment research.

Site Selection

Retailers and real estate teams use global POI data to evaluate new markets before committing capital. By mapping existing brand density and category gaps across candidate cities or countries, a team can spot where a category is underserved or where a competitor has already saturated the market. Avison Young uses SafeGraph data to support exactly this kind of ground-level site selection analysis for commercial real estate clients, replacing guesswork with an actual count of what’s already nearby.

Competitive Intelligence

Because Global Places tracks open and closed dates for every POI, teams can watch a competitor’s footprint expand or contract over time, not just where they are today, but where they’ve been pulling back and where they’re pushing into new territory. A retail chain tracking a competitor’s international rollout can see new store openings within roughly a month of when they’re detected, a much shorter feedback loop than monitoring press releases or store locators market by market.

Investment Research

Store count and footprint change are a widely used alternative data signal for public and private market research. Because the brand info file links each brand to its stock ticker and exchange, analysts can connect physical footprint trends directly to a company’s financials, watching store counts rise or fall across markets as an early read ahead of earnings. For multinational retailers, that signal only holds up if it’s measured the same way in every country the company operates in, which is the core value of a single global schema.

Coverage and Data Quality

SafeGraph organizes country coverage into four tiers, from markets with deep, continuously refreshed coverage across both branded and independent POIs down to markets where only major global brands are currently represented. Coverage keeps expanding: recent releases have added tens of thousands of new POIs in a single market at a time. A recent Spain update, for example, added roughly 22,000 new pharmacy locations in one pass, alongside accuracy cleanup across gas stations and convenience stores.

Across the full dataset, SafeGraph maintains 95%+ brand recall verified against first-party data.
For a live, country-by-country breakdown, see the Places Summary Statistics page, which updates with every release.

The SafeGraph Promise

Global scale only matters if the data underneath it holds up. As SafeGraph has expanded its coverage internationally, the same quality standards that built trust in the US dataset apply everywhere: transparent methodology, publicly documented schema, and monthly freshness verification across every market.

The full schema is available at docs.safegraph.com. Sourcing methodology, freshness definitions, and known market exceptions like Japan are documented and updated with each release. If something about the data doesn’t add up, the answers are there.

That commitment to transparency is what makes Global Places usable as a foundation rather than just a starting point. If you want to understand how we pursue accuracy at scale or how we handle locations inside other locations, it’s all documented.

Get Started with Global Places Data

Global POI data only pays off when it’s built on one reliable schema. See what SafeGraph Global Places covers in your target markets and how it fits into your existing pipeline. Schedule a free consultation with a SafeGraph data expert.