Product Spotlight: Enhanced Filtering with SafeGraph’s Category Tags & Amenity Data

Isolating businesses by location specific characteristics is an everlong industry prompt that is riddled with data access challenges. Knowing the general category of a business is a start, but it leaves much to be desired when thousands of businesses share a similar category. 

A more narrow set of point of interest (POI) features are required to truly explain differences in business outcomes, customer profiles, etc. Does it offer delivery? Is it family-friendly? Can I pay in cash? These types of questions are critical across user search, real estate site selection, audience creation, and compliance.

To make these details more accessible, SafeGraph revamped its Category Tags feature and introduced Amenity Columns: a structured way to query key attributes about physical places. These updates complement our broader effort to improve location intelligence with richer category and amenity data, making it easier to filter places based on the nuances that matter. Available for all bar, restaurant, cafe, hotel, and retail trade places globally.

Why This Matters

Traditionally, many business characteristics such as “accepts reservations,” “has Wifi,” or “cocktail bar” were buried in free-text fields or inferred from inconsistent metadata, which made them difficult to analyze at scale.

SafeGraph’s POI Category Tags and Amenity Columns solve this by:

• Structuring attributes into logical columns
• Adhering to a normalized set of “reader friendly” string values
• Linked to all other contextual attributes like location name, brand, address and coordinate info, open hours, website, phone number, category, etc.

What’s Included

We’ve organized these rich attributes into eight intuitive columns:

All values are consistently formatted and optimized for large-scale querying.

How to Use the Data

These new features aren't just easier to interpret; they’re designed for direct integration into your existing analytics workflow.

Whether you're running SQL queries, training ML models, or enriching location search experiences, actionable insights are easy to extract. Below are a few real-world SQL query examples that demonstrate how to combine Category Tags and Amenity Columns to narrow on specific sets of locations:

1. Find sports bars in New York that have a TV, wifi, parking, happy hour, burgers, and accept reservations:

2. Identify cafes in California that offer bagels, delivery, have outdoor seating, and are family friendly with a casual vibe:

3. Identify Department Stores in Texas that sell perfume:

Real World POI Use Cases

Marketing & Advertising

• Build more accurate/custom location based audience segmentations
• Optimize asset selection for OOH campaigns with more precision 
• Filter out sensitive locations like ‘Kid Friendly’ or ‘LGBTQ Friendly’ 

Maps and Generative AI Search & Discovery

• Surface relevant results from narrow, place based search queries (e.g., ‘Quiet’ cafes with ‘Outdoor Seating’ and ‘Wifi’) 
• Tailor results by user preferences
• Enhance AI-search capabilities with local intent and better contextual recommendations
  

Retail & Real Estate

• Prioritize expansion into areas with specific demand attributes (e.g., restaurants with ‘Drive Through’ and ‘Delivery’)
• Understand competitor footprint by absence or presence of specific store attributes
• Identify gaps in service (e.g., ‘Live Music’ venues in high-density zones)
  

Build with Better Context

With SafeGraph’s POI Category Tags & Amenity Columns, you no longer need to guess what a location offers - you can know.

1. Explore Category Tags & Amenity Columns in our Docs Site
2. Talk to our team to learn more

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