What actually happened
In July 2026 Buxton merged with Elevar and Audiense, and the combined company took the Audiense name. Buxton's site-selection and trade-area tooling is now sold as Audiense In-Person inside a business whose centre of gravity is marketing and audience data rather than real estate.
Nothing about that is fatal. But a rebrand is a reasonable moment to ask what you are paying for and whether the alternatives have moved on.
What Buxton was good at
Buxton's strength was never software. It was a consulting practice: customer segmentation built on a large consumer-profile database, delivered through engagements that ran months rather than days. Published public-sector contracts put it around $40,000 a year.
The options, with prices where they are published
| Platform | What it is | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| Placer.ai | Foot-traffic panel; visits, dwell, YoY | $31,000/yr (Bloomington, IN contract) |
| Buxton / Audiense In-Person | Consulting practice; psychographic segmentation | $40,000/yr (same comparison) |
| SiteZeus (Atlas) | Franchise and multi-unit site scoring | Custom quote |
| Tango Analytics | Portfolio and facilities management | CAD $24,924–49,403/yr |
| GrowthFactor | Self-serve site scoring | From $200/mo, one seat |
| Narrative Geo | Routed drive-time trade areas, 107 chains, chain-wide | Talk to us |
How to choose
- You want a panel. Placer.ai measures visits from mobile devices. Strong for benchmarking who actually shows up. Note that panels extrapolate: a published study puts SafeGraph's device sampling at 7.5%.
- You want site scoring. SiteZeus and GrowthFactor both score candidate addresses. SiteZeus relaunched its territory product as Atlas in May 2026 with automated territory generation.
- You want the analyst relationship back. That is consulting, and it is priced like consulting wherever you buy it.
- You want the trade areas themselves to be right. That is a different problem, and it is the one below.
The question nobody else answers
Most of this market still defines a trade area as a radius, or infers one from a device panel. A three-mile ring is not a trade area. Neither is a sample of 7% of phones. Real catchments are shaped by highways, rivers, bridges and where people already drive.
Narrative Geo does not sample. Every trade area is routed on the actual road network with OSRM, against full Census/ACS population and a maintained POI set. The drive-time matrix is precomputed at 1.08 billion rows, so a national query across a 20,000-store chain returns in seconds rather than being metered per location.
That makes a different class of question answerable: not just is this site good, but how many more of these can the country hold, and how much of my footprint is already covered by a competitor, computed across every store at once.