What we learned mapping almost 299,000 independent businesses

We've mapped 298,682 independent businesses across all fifty states. That's the kind of number you put in an announcement. But a number that big can hide as much as it shows, so here's the honest shape of what's behind it — including the parts that aren't finished.

Most of the map was drawn by volunteers

Nearly three-quarters of our records — 73.7% — come from OpenStreetMap, the open, volunteer-built map of the world. That has a specific consequence: these are places real people chose to add, which makes the coverage rich where mappers are active and thin where they aren't. It's also why we can put 99.1% of our businesses on a map but often can't tell you much else — only 24.7% have a website on file and 32.3% a phone number. We know where they are far better than we know about them.

The next-biggest source is state contractor-license rosters at 24.4%, and that single fact explains most of the directory's personality.

The shape leans toward trades and restaurants — because that's where the data is

Our three largest categories are restaurants (17.1%), retail shops (13.5%), and — this is the surprising one — electricians (13.2%). Electricians nearly outranking retail isn't a fact about the American economy. It's a fact about us. We imported state license rosters for the building trades, so electricians, HVAC, and plumbers are densely covered.

Look at the other end of the list and the gap is stark: 28 accounting firms, 21 law offices, 10 insurance agencies, 7 daycares. There are not seven independent daycares in America — there are hundreds of thousands. They're nearly absent here because nobody has handed us, or OpenStreetMap, a clean list of them, and professional offices are exactly the kind of business a volunteer mapper walks past without pinning. The directory reflects where data was gettable, not where business actually happens. That's the single most important thing to understand about it.

Coverage is wildly uneven by state

Florida alone is 12.7% of the entire directory. Virginia, Texas, and Washington round out the top of the list. At the other end, North Dakota, Idaho, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Wyoming each hold well under one percent of the total.

Some of that is population. Most of it is that we've imported deep license data for a handful of states and haven't gotten to the rest — yet. A ranking of our states is, again, mostly a ranking of which public datasets we've processed, not a measure of where independent business is thriving.

We can map them. We mostly can't vouch for them — yet

Here's the number we think about most: 99.1% of the businesses in Free Range are unverified.

We've hand-confirmed only a handful as independent, flagged a few hundred as national chains or franchises that slipped in, and confirmed 17 as private-equity-owned. Everything else is listed on a good-faith read of the data — no chain name we could find, a valid state license, an OpenStreetMap point a local added. That's a reasonable basis for listing a business. It is not the same as knowing.

We could bury that behind the headline number. We'd rather say it plainly, because it's the entire difference between a directory you can trust and a pile of pins on a map. Verification is slow, human work, and it's the road ahead of us: every listing an owner claims, every one a neighbor vouches for, moves a record from "probably independent" to "we checked."

What the map is telling us to do

The data draws its own to-do list. Fill the professional-services gap and the thin states. Keep the license rosters fresh so a name we trust today is still right next year. And above all, turn coverage into confidence — because the number that will actually matter a year from now isn't 299,000. It's how many of those we can stand behind.

If you own one of these businesses, claiming your listing is the single fastest way to turn a guess into a fact. Claim it — it's free, and it always will be.