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.