Foursquare.com Reviews

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Based on checking the website, Foursquare.com, at its core, has evolved significantly from its early days as a simple check-in app. Originally celebrated for its gamified approach to discovering local businesses and sharing experiences with friends, it has since pivoted to become a robust geospatial intelligence platform, primarily serving businesses with location-based data and insights. While the public-facing “City Guide” experience, which allowed users to find and review places, was sunset on April 28, 2025, the underlying technology and the concept of leveraging location data remain central to Foursquare’s operations, albeit now primarily for enterprise solutions and their consumer app, Swarm, for personal check-ins. This evolution means that while the direct “review” function for consumers on Foursquare.com is no longer prominent, the company’s legacy and impact on how businesses understand and utilize location data are substantial.

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IMPORTANT: We have not personally tested this company’s services. This review is based solely on information provided by the company on their website. For independent, verified user experiences, please refer to trusted sources such as Trustpilot, Reddit, and BBB.org.

Table of Contents

The Evolution of Foursquare: From Social Discovery to Geospatial Intelligence

Foursquare began as a pioneering social network focused on local discovery and gamified check-ins, allowing users to earn badges and become “mayors” of places they frequented.

This initial iteration, launched in 2009, quickly gained traction, becoming synonymous with the early days of location-based services.

Early Days: Gamified Check-ins and Social Engagement

In its nascent stages, Foursquare was a vibrant community where users shared their real-time whereabouts. The “check-in” was king, allowing users to:

  • Discover new places: Users could see where their friends were, or find recommendations based on popular venues.
  • Earn badges: A gamified system rewarded users for visiting specific types of locations or achieving certain check-in milestones.
  • Become “mayors”: The person with the most check-ins at a venue in a 60-day period became its mayor, a coveted digital title.
  • Leave tips and reviews: Users could leave short text-based tips and basic reviews about businesses, helping others decide where to go.

This era saw Foursquare accumulate a vast amount of voluntarily contributed location data, which would later become the bedrock of its enterprise offerings. By 2013, Foursquare had over 40 million registered users, demonstrating its early success in user adoption.

The Split: Foursquare City Guide and Swarm

In 2014, Foursquare made a pivotal decision to split its core functionality into two separate applications:

  • Foursquare City Guide: This app retained the discovery and recommendation features, allowing users to search for places, read reviews, and get personalized suggestions. Its focus remained on helping users find the best places to eat, drink, shop, and explore.
  • Swarm: This new app took over the social check-in functionality, allowing users to track their whereabouts, compete with friends, and see who was nearby. It essentially became the personal logbook and social sharing component.

This strategic move aimed to cater to two distinct user behaviors: active discovery versus passive logging.

While Foursquare City Guide aimed to compete with Yelp and Google Maps in local search, Swarm maintained the original social and gamified spirit.

The Pivot: Geospatial Intelligence for Businesses

Over time, Foursquare recognized the immense value of the proprietary location data it had amassed – millions of check-ins, tips, and venue data points. This led to a significant pivot towards becoming a B2B geospatial technology provider. The company started offering its location intelligence to other businesses for various applications, including:

  • Audience segmentation: Helping marketers understand consumer behavior based on foot traffic patterns.
  • Attribution: Measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns by tracking store visits.
  • Real estate analytics: Identifying prime locations for new businesses based on pedestrian flow.
  • Urban planning: Providing insights into how people move through cities.

This shift marked Foursquare’s transformation from a consumer-centric app to a data powerhouse, leveraging machine learning and AI to deliver actionable insights from its vast location dataset.

The Role of Reviews in Foursquare’s Ecosystem Past and Present

While Foursquare.com no longer hosts public consumer reviews in the traditional sense following the sunsetting of its City Guide, the concept of user feedback and data-driven insights remains integral to its underlying business model. Openstreetmap.com Reviews

Understanding how reviews functioned historically and how similar data is now leveraged by businesses is crucial.

Historical Function of Consumer Reviews

In its Foursquare City Guide era, user-generated reviews often called “tips” were a cornerstone of the platform.

These were typically short, informal pieces of advice or commentary about a specific venue.

  • What they looked like: Unlike Yelp or Google reviews, Foursquare tips were often concise, sometimes just a few words, highlighting a specific dish, a good bartender, or a quiet spot. They were less about detailed narratives and more about quick, actionable insights.
  • Impact on user discovery: Tips helped users make quick decisions about where to go. A tip like ““Try the truffle fries!”” was more effective for a quick browse than a lengthy, multi-paragraph review.
  • Gamification incentive: Leaving tips and reviews contributed to a user’s overall activity score, encouraging more engagement.

This collective intelligence formed a rich dataset about public sentiment and popular features of millions of venues worldwide.

The Evolution of “Reviews” into Location Intelligence

With the pivot to a B2B model, the raw “review” data has been transmuted into something more sophisticated: location intelligence. Foursquare no longer relies on explicit user reviews on its main platform for public consumption. Instead, it aggregates and analyzes vast datasets, including:

  • Proprietary check-in data from Swarm: This provides real-time foot traffic and visitation patterns.
  • Third-party data integrations: Partnerships with other platforms to enrich their dataset.
  • Passive location signals: Data derived from SDKs integrated into other apps with user consent.

This aggregated data allows Foursquare to derive insights that are arguably more powerful and scalable than individual reviews for business purposes. For example, instead of a review saying “This coffee shop is always busy,” Foursquare’s platform can quantify that this specific coffee shop sees an average of 500 unique visitors daily, with peak times between 8 AM and 10 AM on weekdays, and that 30% of its visitors also frequent a nearby gym. This data-driven approach moves beyond qualitative opinions to quantitative behavior.

How Businesses Leverage Foursquare’s Data Post-Review Era

Businesses now use Foursquare’s geospatial data for a multitude of strategic applications, which indirectly fulfill the need for “review”-like insights.

  • Competitive analysis: Understanding competitor foot traffic and customer overlap.
  • Site selection: Identifying optimal locations for new stores based on demographic patterns and traffic flow.
  • Marketing campaign optimization: Targeting ads based on where people go and measuring the real-world impact of campaigns. For instance, a retailer might use Foursquare data to determine that a recent ad campaign led to a 15% increase in foot traffic to their stores from the exposed audience.
  • Market research: Gaining insights into consumer behavior and market trends. For example, identifying emerging neighborhoods based on increasing visitation rates.

Therefore, while “Foursquare.com Reviews” in the consumer sense are largely a thing of the past, the core purpose of understanding places and human interaction with them has been significantly enhanced and industrialized.

Foursquare’s Current Offerings: A Deep Dive into Geospatial Solutions

Today, Foursquare is not a consumer-facing review site but a comprehensive geospatial platform offering a suite of location technology solutions primarily for businesses. Their offerings are segmented to address various industry needs, all fueled by their robust location data and advanced AI capabilities.

Foursquare Places: The Foundation of Location Data

At the heart of Foursquare’s platform is Foursquare Places, a massive global dataset of points of interest POIs. This isn’t just a list of addresses. it’s a rich, dynamic database containing: Quotapath.com Reviews

  • Comprehensive POI data: Over 100 million unique venues globally, with details like category, address, phone number, opening hours, and more.
  • Hierarchical categorization: A sophisticated taxonomy that allows for precise filtering and analysis e.g., “Coffee Shop” under “Food & Drink”.
  • Demographic overlays: Information about the surrounding population, such as average income or age distribution, for a given POI.
  • Dynamic updates: The database is constantly updated through various feeds, ensuring accuracy and reflecting real-world changes.

Businesses use Foursquare Places data for everything from building their own mapping applications to enhancing their analytics platforms.

It serves as the authoritative source for location information, crucial for any business relying on geographical data.

Foursquare Pilgrim SDK: Powering Location-Aware Apps

The Pilgrim SDK Software Development Kit is a key tool for app developers looking to integrate sophisticated location awareness into their own applications. It’s designed to:

  • Detect real-world visits: Accurately identify when users arrive at or leave specific places e.g., a retail store, airport, or restaurant without significant battery drain.
  • Contextualize user behavior: Understand the context of a user’s presence e.g., “They are at a coffee shop” versus just “They are at latitude X, longitude Y”.
  • Trigger relevant experiences: Enable apps to send personalized notifications, loyalty offers, or content based on a user’s real-world location. For example, a loyalty app could send a push notification about a discount when a user walks into a partner store.
  • Anonymized data collection: When integrated into partner apps, and with user consent, Pilgrim SDK contributes to Foursquare’s overall understanding of foot traffic patterns, always with a strong emphasis on privacy and anonymization.

This SDK is particularly valuable for retail, travel, and lifestyle apps that aim to enhance user engagement through highly personalized, location-based interactions.

Foursquare Audiences: Targeted Marketing & Advertising

Foursquare Audiences leverages the platform’s vast understanding of real-world behavior to help marketers reach specific consumer segments.

  • Behavioral segments: Create audiences based on where people go in the real world e.g., “frequent gym-goers,” “luxury shoppers,” “fast-food enthusiasts”.
  • Visit attribution: Measure the impact of digital ad campaigns on actual store visits. For instance, a brand running a mobile ad campaign can use Foursquare Audiences to determine that their ad led to a 7% uplift in store visits among exposed users compared to a control group.
  • Privacy-compliant data: All audience segments are built using aggregated, anonymized, and privacy-first data, adhering to strict data protection regulations.
  • Integration with ad platforms: Audiences can be seamlessly exported and activated across major advertising platforms, allowing for precise targeting.

This offering is a must for businesses looking to optimize their marketing spend by targeting consumers based on their verified real-world behaviors rather than just online browsing history.

Foursquare Attribution: Measuring Offline Impact

Foursquare Attribution directly addresses one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing: measuring the offline impact of online campaigns.

  • Connects digital ads to physical visits: Provides a clear link between ad exposure and actual store visits, closing the loop on omnichannel marketing.
  • Granular reporting: Offers insights into visit lift, incremental visits, and cost per incremental visit, allowing marketers to optimize campaign performance.
  • Competitive benchmarking: Allows businesses to compare their campaign performance against industry benchmarks.
  • Cross-device measurement: Can attribute visits across different devices, providing a holistic view of the customer journey.

A major CPG brand might use Foursquare Attribution to prove that their new online video ad campaign drove a 2.3x increase in foot traffic to grocery stores from the audience who viewed the ad. This capability is critical for demonstrating ROI for location-centric businesses.

Foursquare Analytics: Strategic Business Insights

  • Foot traffic analysis: Detailed insights into visitation patterns for any location, including peak hours, dwell times, and repeat visits.
  • Competitive intelligence: Analyze competitor performance, market share, and customer overlap. For example, a retail chain could use Foursquare Analytics to see that a competitor’s new store opening led to a 10% dip in their own foot traffic in a specific zip code.
  • Site selection optimization: Identify ideal locations for new stores, restaurants, or offices based on robust geospatial data.
  • Custom reporting: Generate bespoke reports tailored to specific business questions, leveraging the full depth of Foursquare’s location dataset.

This suite of tools transforms raw location data into actionable business intelligence, enabling strategic decision-making across various departments, from operations to marketing and real estate.

The Technology Behind the Data: AI, Machine Learning, and Privacy

AI and Machine Learning in Data Processing

Foursquare leverages AI and ML extensively to process, analyze, and derive insights from its massive datasets. Arist.com Reviews

  • POI accuracy and disambiguation: ML algorithms are used to clean, de-duplicate, and maintain the accuracy of the Places database. This ensures that “Starbucks at Main Street” is correctly identified as one unique location, distinct from “Starbucks at Oak Avenue.”
  • Visit inference: AI models are crucial for interpreting raw location signals GPS, Wi-Fi, cell towers and accurately inferring when a user has visited a specific venue. This goes beyond simple proximity, accounting for factors like dwell time and movement patterns. Foursquare claims a 90%+ accuracy rate in visit detection, which is significantly higher than basic geo-fencing.
  • Trend prediction: ML is used to identify emerging trends, predict future foot traffic patterns, and forecast market shifts based on historical and real-time data.
  • Anomaly detection: AI helps flag unusual activity or data discrepancies, ensuring the integrity and reliability of the insights provided.

The continuous feedback loop between human validation and machine learning refinement ensures the high quality and utility of Foursquare’s data products.

Data Aggregation and Anonymization

Foursquare’s data comes from multiple sources, primarily its Swarm app, Pilgrim SDK integrations in other apps, and strategic partnerships. A critical component of their data handling is aggregation and anonymization to protect user privacy.

  • Privacy-by-design: Foursquare emphasizes building privacy into the core of its data collection and processing methodologies from the outset.
  • Aggregation: Individual user data is aggregated into large, anonymous datasets. For example, insights are presented as “20% of people who visited Store A also visited Store B,” rather than identifying specific individuals.
  • Anonymization: Techniques are used to remove any personally identifiable information PII from the data before it’s used for analysis or sold to businesses. This includes hashing unique identifiers and applying differential privacy techniques.
  • User consent: For data collected through SDKs, explicit user consent is required for location tracking and data sharing. Users typically opt-in within the settings of the apps that integrate Foursquare’s technology.

In an era of increasing data privacy concerns, Foursquare’s rigorous approach to anonymization and aggregation is fundamental to its operations and compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Scalability and Global Reach

Foursquare’s platform is built to handle massive volumes of data, reflecting its global footprint.

  • Cloud infrastructure: Leveraging scalable cloud computing platforms allows Foursquare to process billions of location signals daily.
  • Global POI coverage: Their Places database covers virtually every country, with a strong focus on major economic centers and urban areas.
  • Real-time processing: The ability to process data in near real-time enables dynamic insights and responsive ad targeting.

This technological backbone ensures that Foursquare can provide timely, accurate, and comprehensive location intelligence to its diverse client base across various industries and geographies.

Business Listing on Foursquare.com: Is It Still Relevant?

While Foursquare.com has shifted away from being a primary consumer review site, it still offers a way for businesses to “claim and manage” their presence. This isn’t about collecting direct reviews for public display on Foursquare.com anymore, but rather about ensuring your business information is accurate within Foursquare’s foundational Places database, which powers numerous other services.

The Purpose of a Business Listing Now

Listing a business on Foursquare.com today serves a different strategic purpose than it did a decade ago.

  • Data accuracy for the Foursquare Places database: The primary reason to claim your listing is to ensure that the core information about your business address, phone number, category, hours is correct within Foursquare’s vast POI database. This database is then licensed and used by thousands of other applications and services.
  • Powering other apps and services: When you update your Foursquare listing, that accurate information can propagate to other apps that license Foursquare’s Places data, such as Snapchat, Uber, Apple Maps, and many more. This means that users finding your business through these platforms will see the correct details.
  • Basic business visibility limited: While Foursquare.com itself won’t drive significant direct consumer traffic for reviews, an accurate listing ensures your business can be found in the vast network of apps and services that rely on Foursquare’s location data.
  • Swarm visibility: Your business will still appear in the Swarm app for users who check in, and having correct details is important there.

It’s less about direct consumer reviews and more about being correctly represented in a critical underlying location data layer.

How to List/Claim Your Business

The process for listing or claiming a business on Foursquare is straightforward:

  1. Visit the Foursquare for Business section: Navigate to the business portal on Foursquare.com.
  2. Search for your business: Enter your business name and address to see if it already exists in their database.
  3. Claim or Add: If your business exists, you can claim it by verifying ownership often through a phone call or email. If it doesn’t, you can add it as a new venue.
  4. Update information: Once claimed, you can update details like business hours, categories, contact information, and add photos.

Keeping this information meticulously updated is a small effort with potentially broad downstream effects for your business’s online discoverability across many platforms. Meetup.com Reviews

The Diminished Role of Consumer Engagement on Foursquare.com

It’s crucial to understand that direct consumer engagement like leaving reviews or tips on Foursquare.com itself is minimal, if not entirely absent, after the City Guide sunset.

  • No public review section: There isn’t a dedicated “reviews” section for consumers to write new reviews that appear on Foursquare.com.
  • Focus on B2B clients: The Foursquare.com website is now squarely aimed at attracting and serving businesses, not individual consumers seeking local recommendations.
  • Swarm for personal use: The consumer check-in experience and personal venue logging have been fully delegated to the Swarm app.

Therefore, for businesses primarily concerned with acquiring new customer reviews for public display, platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, and TripAdvisor are far more relevant and active.

Foursquare’s value proposition for businesses is now rooted in the accuracy of its underlying data and the powerful insights it can provide to enterprise clients.

The Future of Location Data: Beyond Traditional Reviews

The trajectory of Foursquare.com, from a consumer-facing review platform to a B2B geospatial intelligence leader, reflects a broader trend in the data economy: the shift from qualitative, individual opinions to quantitative, aggregated behavioral insights.

The future of location data promises even more sophisticated applications that move beyond simple “reviews” to predictive analytics and hyper-personalization.

Predictive Analytics and Behavioral Trends

The next frontier for location data involves leveraging AI and ML not just to understand what happened, but to predict what will happen.

  • Predictive foot traffic: Anticipating future foot traffic patterns for retail planning, staffing, and inventory management.
  • Market trend forecasting: Identifying nascent trends in consumer behavior by analyzing early shifts in visitation patterns to specific types of businesses or neighborhoods. For example, predicting a surge in demand for vegan restaurants in a certain area based on an increase in relevant foot traffic.
  • Event impact analysis: Forecasting the impact of large-scale events concerts, festivals, sporting events on surrounding businesses and infrastructure.
  • Economic indicators: Aggregated, anonymized location data can serve as a powerful leading indicator for economic activity, providing insights into consumer spending confidence and mobility.

This level of predictive capability, built on vast historical and real-time location datasets, offers unparalleled strategic advantages for businesses.

Hyper-Personalization and Contextual Experiences

Location data, when ethically collected and applied, enables incredibly personalized and contextual experiences for consumers.

  • Dynamic content delivery: Apps can deliver content relevant to a user’s precise location and context e.g., a museum app providing information about an exhibit as a user walks past it.
  • Personalized recommendations beyond reviews: Instead of relying solely on written reviews, future recommendations could be based on a user’s actual historical visitation patterns and preferences inferred from their real-world movements.
  • Proactive service: Imagine a car rental app pre-populating your pickup location as you approach the airport, or a smart home system adjusting lighting as you arrive home.
  • Smart city applications: Location data can be crucial for optimizing traffic flow, managing public transport, and emergency response in urban environments.

The key to hyper-personalization lies in respecting privacy and ensuring transparency about data usage, as demonstrated by Foursquare’s approach to anonymization.

Ethical Considerations and Data Privacy

As location data becomes more pervasive and powerful, so too do the ethical considerations and the imperative for robust data privacy frameworks. Coral.com Reviews

  • Informed consent: Ensuring users genuinely understand what data is being collected and how it will be used.
  • Anonymization challenges: Continuously refining anonymization techniques to prevent re-identification, especially as datasets grow larger and more complex.
  • Regulation compliance: Navigating the patchwork of global data privacy regulations GDPR, CCPA, etc. and advocating for responsible data use.
  • Transparency and accountability: Companies collecting and using location data must be transparent about their practices and accountable for protecting user privacy.

Foursquare, by emphasizing anonymized and aggregated data for B2B insights, positions itself as a leader in responsible location data utilization.

The future of location data isn’t just about collecting more of it, but about using it wisely, ethically, and for genuinely valuable purposes that benefit both businesses and consumers.

Alternatives for Consumer Reviews and Local Discovery

Given Foursquare.com’s pivot away from direct consumer reviews, users seeking local recommendations and a platform to leave feedback should turn to other established services.

These platforms actively curate and prominently display user-generated content, making them the go-to resources for local discovery and review sharing.

Google Business Profile Google Maps

Google Business Profile formerly Google My Business is arguably the most impactful platform for local reviews.

  • Ubiquitous search integration: Reviews and business information appear directly in Google Search results and Google Maps, making them highly visible to a vast audience. Over 90% of local searches happen on Google.
  • Photos and Q&A: Users can upload photos, and businesses can answer questions directly, creating a rich interaction space.
  • Star rating system: A simple 5-star rating system, complemented by written reviews, makes it easy for users to quickly gauge a business’s reputation.
  • Business owner tools: Provides robust tools for businesses to manage their listings, respond to reviews, and track performance.

For any business, prioritizing Google Business Profile is paramount due to its direct impact on local SEO and customer acquisition.

Yelp

Yelp remains a prominent player in the local review space, particularly strong in the restaurant and service industries.

  • Detailed, qualitative reviews: Yelp is known for its longer, more descriptive reviews, often providing nuanced insights into customer experiences.
  • Review filter algorithm: Yelp employs an algorithm to filter out what it considers “unhelpful” or “unreal” reviews, aiming for authenticity.
  • Direct messaging and Request a Quote: Users can often message businesses directly or request quotes for services.
  • Elite Squad: A community of highly active and trusted reviewers, which adds a layer of curated quality to the platform.

While some businesses have mixed feelings about Yelp’s review filtering, it continues to be a significant source of customer feedback and discovery for millions of users.

TripAdvisor

Primarily focused on travel and hospitality, TripAdvisor is the go-to platform for hotels, restaurants, attractions, and vacation rentals.

  • Global reach: Highly influential for international travelers, with reviews and listings for virtually every tourist destination.
  • Photos and videos: Users heavily rely on photos and videos uploaded by other travelers to make decisions.
  • Specific categories: Offers detailed categories for different types of travel experiences e.g., “restaurants,” “things to do,” “hotels”.
  • Booking integration: Often allows users to book hotels or activities directly through the platform.

For businesses in the travel and tourism sector, maintaining a strong presence on TripAdvisor is essential for visibility and reputation management. Artify.com Reviews

Specialized Review Sites

Depending on the industry, there are numerous specialized review sites that are highly relevant:

  • Health and Wellness: Zocdoc doctors, Mindbody fitness studios.
  • Home Services: Angie’s List now Angi, HomeAdvisor.
  • Automotive: DealerRater, Cars.com.
  • Real Estate: Zillow, Trulia.
  • Fashion/Retail: Many brands host reviews directly on their e-commerce sites, or utilize platforms like Trustpilot for service reviews.

For consumers, exploring these niche platforms can provide highly specific and relevant feedback.

For businesses, identifying the most influential review sites within their specific industry is key to managing their online reputation effectively.

Security and Privacy Concerns in Location Data

The collection and use of location data, while incredibly powerful for business insights, inherently raise significant security and privacy concerns.

Data Breaches and Cybersecurity Risks

Any large database, especially one containing sensitive location information, is a potential target for cyberattacks.

  • Risk of PII exposure: While Foursquare emphasizes anonymization, any breach that exposes raw, unaggregated location data could theoretically be used to infer individual movements if not properly secured.
  • Vulnerability of partner apps: If a partner app integrating Foursquare’s SDK has security vulnerabilities, it could potentially compromise the data collected through that integration.
  • Reputational damage: A significant data breach can severely damage a company’s reputation and lead to loss of trust from both consumers and business clients.

Foursquare, like other data companies, invests heavily in cybersecurity measures, including encryption, access controls, and regular security audits, to mitigate these risks.

Ethical Use and Misuse of Location Data

Beyond technical security, the ethical implications of location data use are a major concern.

  • Surveillance concerns: The ability to track movements raises fears of government or corporate surveillance, even if the data is anonymized and aggregated.
  • Targeted advertising abuse: While Foursquare aims for ethical ad targeting, the potential for discriminatory or predatory advertising based on inferred behaviors is a societal challenge.
  • Lack of transparency: If users aren’t fully aware of how their location data is being used, it can erode trust and lead to a perception of misuse.
  • Weaponization of data: In extreme cases, location data could be misused for harmful purposes, though this is typically prevented by strict usage policies and legal frameworks.

Foursquare addresses these concerns through strict terms of service with its business clients, prohibiting the use of its data for unethical purposes, and by committing to privacy-by-design principles. They typically focus on aggregated insights rather than individual tracking for client applications.

Regulatory Compliance and User Control

  • GDPR General Data Protection Regulation: Europe’s stringent data privacy law requires explicit consent for data collection and provides users with rights like the right to access, rectify, and erase their data.
  • CCPA California Consumer Privacy Act: Similar to GDPR, CCPA gives California residents rights regarding their personal information, including the right to know what data is collected and to opt-out of its sale.

Foursquare’s commitment to anonymization, aggregation, and explicit user consent for SDK data is designed to align with these regulations.

For consumers, managing location settings on their devices and within individual apps remains the primary way to control their data. Myfonts.com Reviews

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Foursquare.com still active for reviews?

No, based on checking the website, Foursquare.com’s consumer-facing “City Guide” web experience, which included public reviews, was sunset on April 28, 2025. The website primarily serves as a platform for their business geospatial intelligence solutions now.

What happened to Foursquare City Guide?

Foursquare City Guide, the app and web experience for finding and reviewing local places, was sunset on April 28, 2025. Foursquare has shifted its focus to its B2B geospatial platform and its consumer check-in app, Swarm.

What is Foursquare primarily used for now?

Foursquare is primarily used by businesses as a geospatial intelligence platform, providing location data, analytics, and insights for purposes like marketing, site selection, and understanding consumer behavior.

Is Swarm still part of Foursquare?

Yes, Swarm is still Foursquare’s consumer app for personal check-ins and logging the places you visit.

It functions independently from the Foursquare.com business platform.

Can I still check in on Foursquare?

Yes, you can still check in to places using the Swarm app, which is maintained by Foursquare for personal check-ins and social sharing with friends.

How does Foursquare collect location data?

Foursquare collects location data primarily through its Swarm app, integrations of its Pilgrim SDK in other apps with user consent, and strategic partnerships with other data providers.

Is Foursquare’s location data accurate?

Yes, Foursquare leverages AI and machine learning to process and verify its location data, aiming for high accuracy in its Foursquare Places database and visit detection, claiming over 90% accuracy in visit inference.

How do businesses use Foursquare’s data?

Businesses use Foursquare’s data for various purposes, including competitive analysis, site selection, marketing campaign optimization, audience segmentation, and measuring offline ad attribution.

What is Foursquare Places?

Foursquare Places is a massive global dataset of over 100 million unique points of interest POIs with detailed information, serving as the foundational location data for Foursquare’s enterprise solutions. Sidebar.com Reviews

What is Foursquare Pilgrim SDK?

The Pilgrim SDK is a Software Development Kit that app developers can integrate into their apps to enable highly accurate real-world visit detection and contextualize user behavior based on location.

Does Foursquare sell my personal data?

Foursquare states that it prioritizes privacy by using aggregated and anonymized data for its business solutions. They do not sell personally identifiable information to their clients.

Are there alternatives to Foursquare for consumer reviews?

Yes, prominent alternatives for consumer reviews and local discovery include Google Maps/Google Business Profile, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, along with many specialized review sites for specific industries.

How can I list my business on Foursquare?

You can list or claim your business on Foursquare by visiting the Foursquare for Business section on their website, searching for your venue, and following the verification steps to ensure your information is accurate in their database.

Does Foursquare help with local SEO?

Indirectly, yes.

By ensuring your business information is accurate in Foursquare’s Places database, you help propagate correct data to other platforms that license Foursquare’s data, which can support overall local SEO efforts.

Is Foursquare still relevant today?

Yes, Foursquare is highly relevant today, but primarily as a leading B2B provider of geospatial intelligence and location technology, rather than as a consumer-facing review site.

What kind of insights can Foursquare Analytics provide?

Foursquare Analytics can provide insights into foot traffic patterns, competitive intelligence, market trends, and aid in site selection optimization for businesses.

How does Foursquare ensure data privacy?

Foursquare ensures data privacy through privacy-by-design principles, anonymization and aggregation techniques, and by obtaining explicit user consent for location data collection via its SDKs.

What is attribution in the context of Foursquare?

Foursquare Attribution measures the offline impact of online advertising campaigns by linking digital ad exposure to actual physical store visits, helping businesses understand their marketing ROI. Nozbe.com Reviews

Can I still find tips or recommendations on Foursquare.com?

No, with the sunsetting of the City Guide web experience, Foursquare.com no longer prominently displays public tips or recommendations from consumers. The focus is on business solutions.

What is the difference between Foursquare and Swarm?

Foursquare now primarily Foursquare.com for business is a geospatial intelligence platform for enterprises, while Swarm is its companion consumer app for social check-ins and personal location logging.

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