places data
Maintaining a high-quality, global data point collection is hard. See how data leaders leverage Places as their source of truth for any location in the world.
Places is a comprehensive dataset of global points of interest (POIs). If you need POI data, join the 1000’s of organizations who trust Places as their source of truth.
The more POI data points you have access to, the more you can refine your models. Places includes thousands of distinct brands and categories, from large corporations to mom-and-pop stores and industrial locations, powering location intelligence analytics across industries and use cases.
Models are only as accurate as the data they run on. SafeGraph uses patented machine learning techniques combined with human capital to verify all data points for accuracy, including when a business opened and/or closed so you can stay up-to-date on a dynamically changing world.
Learn how we keep our Places data fresh
Explore POI data for any brand anywhere in the world.
Like all of our data, the cost of Places depends on the amount of rows, columns, and frequency of delivery you request. You can buy data directly from our site or contact our sales team to learn about enterprise pricing.
SafeGraph issues updates to Places once per month, which is much more frequently than other POI vendors, who may update once every 3-6 months. We can do this because we work with more sources of data and are much more efficient at combining those sources. During each month, some subset of our sources will send us their updates, and we ensure that we onboard and integrate those changes quickly and easily.
This enables us to quickly reflect store openings and closings in our Places database. The time between a store opening/closing and being reflected in our Places database is approximately equal to the time that the store update is seen by one of our sources and the time it takes SafeGraph to reflect this in our data. The latter of these two is typically within the month, which is very fast compared to other providers, which might be within 3 months. The former of these two is hard to predict - but we do work with sources that generally receive updates very quickly.
Opened and closed dates are determined from metadata at the source level. If a new POI from an existing source repeatedly appears in our build pipeline, it is flagged as “opened_on” during the month in which it first appears. Similarly, if a POI from an existing source repeatedly disappears in our build pipeline, it is flagged as “closed_on” during the month in which it first disappears. These flags are added to the Places product permitting final QA checks and overall data hygiene.
Temporary closures are not captured in open/close tracking, and it became difficult to distinguish permanent closures from temporary closures at the onset of COVID-19. This resulted in a relatively low count of POIs with “closed_on” values between 2020-03 and 2020-06 as we erred towards the side of caution to not mistakenly mark temporarily closed businesses as permanently closed.
If a POI has not yet been sourced consistently enough to provide the metadata needed to determine “closed_on” dates, then it will have a null value in the tracking_closed_since column. In general, the SafeGraph Places product tracks opened and closed dates from as early as 2019-07 onward.
These columns are specific to Places. These are not available in standalone Geometry, Spend, or Patterns purchases. If Places is purchased in combination with another SafeGraph dataset, the Geometry, Spend, or Patterns specific fields will be null for any POIs with a “closed_on” date. Please reference Column Ordering for details on where these columns exist per product combination.
SafeGraph Places uses the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) developed by the US Census Bureau, which consists of a numeric NAICS code up to 6 digits in length. Although this taxonomy was developed in the US, we have found it just as useful for categorizing POIs in other countries as well and will continue to use it until a better alternative presents itself.
The code itself is hierarchical; in other words, the first 2 digits describe a very general category, and additional digits describe more and more specific categories.
