---
title: "How we count — ListVista"
description: "Six sources give six different answers to the same question. This page explains ours, so you can judge it."
url: "https://listvista.com/method/"
language: "en"
---

# How we count

Six sources give six different answers to the same question. This page explains ours, so you can judge it.

## The scan

We read public local business listings on a fixed schedule, city by city. Every dataset page carries the day its data was taken and the day it will be taken again. A page is never published with a date it does not own.

## The counting rule

One record is one physical location. A chain with eleven depots is eleven records, not one. A business is counted in a category when that category is its primary listed activity, not when it merely mentions it.

## The official comparison

Beside our own count we print the official statistic — Insee Sirene in France, the Census County Business Patterns in the United States — and the difference between the two. The usual causes are businesses trading under a second name, locations that closed between the two collection dates, and register entries with no visible activity.

We publish the difference rather than hide it. A count that shows its working is the one worth citing.

## What we do not do

We do not estimate. We do not fill an empty field with a guess. We do not round a number up in prose. If a place holds fewer than 30 records, it gets no page of its own and becomes a row in its parent table.

_Compiled by Yassine Belatar, lead data analyst._

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ListVista — https://listvista.com/ · All counts on this site carry the date they were taken.