Methodology
Where every number on this site comes from, and what it does not mean.
The venue data
Every venue begins as an OpenStreetMap record — 17,658 of them across New Zealand, pulled through the Overpass API and refreshed quarterly. OpenStreetMap is community-maintained and licensed under the Open Database Licence, which we comply with in the way the licence actually requires: visible attribution on every page, and our merged extract offered back under the same licence on the open data page. The pages, the analysis and the writing are ours; the underlying database is everyone's.
Records are normalised, then deduplicated by name and position within 70 metres. That threshold is deliberately tight, because New Zealand is full of chains — Subway, Columbus Coffee, Mojo, Lone Star — whose branches sit kilometres apart under one name and are genuinely separate venues. The obvious shortcut, treating repeated names as duplicates, would delete exactly the venues most people are looking for. What does get merged is the same business recorded twice under different tags: a country pub with rooms is mapped both as a pub and as accommodation, and belongs on one page.
Which venues get their own page
Most do not, on purpose. A venue earns its own URL only if we hold at least six distinct attributes for it and its opening hours — enough for the page to say something you could not get from a list. Everything else is listed on its town page. After the pages are built we measure them again: any venue page that comes out under 400 words, or that reads more than 55% the same as another venue page in the same town and category, is demoted back to a row. On the current data that removed 26 pages. The point is that a page with a name and a map pin on it wastes your time, and publishing thousands of them is how directories become landfill.
Why we publish gaps
A blank field on this site means unrecorded, never absent. If we do not know whether a café has step-free access, the page says so by name rather than leaving a silence that reads as "no". This matters most to the people for whom the answer is not optional, and it is the single most common way directories mislead without ever stating a falsehood.
What we will not do
We do not take payment for listings, placement or ranking. We publish no ratings or reviews of our own, and no structured-data ratings — we hold none, and inventing them would be both a lie and a policy breach. We do not use data from Google Places, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Zomato or booking sites: their terms forbid it, and a directory rebuilt from another directory adds nothing. Where venues are ordered, the order is by how much we know about them, which is a statement about the data and not about the food.
Corrections
Almost every error here is an error in OpenStreetMap, and can be fixed at the source by anyone in a few minutes — which then improves every map and app that uses it, not just this site. Each venue page links to its underlying OpenStreetMap record for exactly that reason.