Catalog / Digital Exhaust / Data feed
Digital Exhaust · daily ban:high tC

Google Maps popular-times drift for specific small retail chain locations

hourly 'popular times' busyness index per store location, tracked over weeks

Feed detail
Measures
hourly 'popular times' busyness index per store location, tracked over weeks
Source
Google Maps Places API (popular_times not officially exposed; requires scraping the Maps web widget) or third-party like populartimes library
Access
scrape-hostile
Cadence
dailyupdates once a day
Thesis
foot-traffic busyness trend across a chain's locations leads same-store-sales for small-cap retail/restaurant names lacking Placer.ai coverage
Maps to
small-cap regional retail and restaurant chains not covered by commercial foot-traffic vendors
Crowdedness
contested
Tier
tC
Ban-risk
ban:high
Where this stands

This is a catalogued data feed with a research idea attached, not a validated edge. Being listed here means it has a specific source and a one-sentence causal mechanism mapped to what it should move — it doesn’t mean it has cleared the five-stage validation gate (point-in-time hygiene, out-of-sample holdout, multiple-testing correction, and the portfolio-layer backstop). As of today, every score on this site is prior-only; zero signals in the catalog have been promoted to “measured” status. See the methodology page for the full validation process and current counts.

Browse the rest of Digital ExhaustApp-store rankings, job postings, web traffic, and other byproducts of running a business — the exhaust that leaks intent early.