August 3, 2026 · Six-month sweep of r/boulder, TripAdvisor, Boulder Reporting Lab, Daily Camera and Eater Denver, diffed against all 798 rows in boulder.db

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The headline

Your closure detection is working better than I expected. Of the sixteen venues the press and Reddit discussed as closed in the last six months, eleven were already flagged closed_forever in your database: My Neighbor Felix, High Country, Bellota, Breadworks, Under The Sun, Sanitas, Dark Horse, Gaku Ramen, and others. The two-signal rule from the last session is earning its keep.

What follows is the narrow set it missed, plus five venues that exist and aren't in the database at all. Nothing here is a crisis. All of it is a half-day of work.

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1. The Williams Village block, which is the most interesting thing I found

Boulder Reporting Lab, writing about Dark Horse:

"the deadline is still unclear for the other eateries in the nearby to-be-demolished Williams Village Shopping Center including Carelli's of Boulder, Moe's Original Bar B Que, Cosmo's Pizza and Dairy Queen."

Here's what your database holds for those addresses:

Look at the addresses: 645, 659, 675, 685 on 30th Street. One consecutive block, one demolition event, four listings. Dark Horse next door is already correctly flagged.

This is the actionable pattern. Your current rule needs a Google closed flag plus 90 days of reviewer silence. A shopping center scheduled for demolition doesn't produce either signal until the day it shuts, so a whole block goes stale at once and your detector can't see it coming. Add a third, cheaper signal: when one venue on a block is confirmed closed for redevelopment, flag its immediate address neighbors for review. It's a query, not an LLM call.

Carelli's is the one to act on now. A February closing date reported on the restaurant's own Facebook page, still showing as open with 1,270 reviews in August, is exactly the kind of thing that made you build the closed-venue badge in the first place.

2. One clean miss

J&L Distilling Company, 4843 Pearl St #1a. Your DB says OPEN, 4.7, 112 reviews.

Boulder Reporting Lab: "TooSteppin Saloon is open at 4843 Pearl St. (formerly J&L Distilling)."

Same suite number, new tenant. J&L is gone and TooSteppin isn't in your database at all, so that address currently shows a business that doesn't exist and hides one that does.

3. Venues that exist and aren't in your database

Two I flagged as missing turned out to be false alarms and are correctly in your database: Steakhouse No. 316 (Reddit calls it a favorite) and Mister Oso.

4. What the sweep says about your data quality generally

Your database holds 798 businesses with 126 currently flagged closed_forever. I scanned every address for multi-tenant collisions and found 121. Most are legitimate: Avanti and Rosetta Hall are food halls with many vendors, St Julien is a hotel with a restaurant and a lounge, Whole Foods has a bakery and a coffee bar.

But the collision scan did correctly surface the successor pattern in every case where a new tenant replaced a closed one, and in each of those the predecessor was already flagged:

• 627 S Broadway: Under The Sun (flagged closed) → Morso (open)
• 1035 Pearl St: next door KITCHEN & BAR and Gaku Ramen (both flagged) → Busaba (open)
• 1117 Pearl St: High Country (flagged) → Wellness Counter (open)
• 4580 Broadway D1: Bellota (flagged) → Cinq à Sept Bistro (open)
• 901 Pearl St: My Neighbor Felix (flagged) → Casa Juani (open)

The successor signal is the strongest closure evidence available and you're not using it yet. A new business appearing at an address where you already list one is near-proof the first one closed, and it needs no news search and no 90-day wait. Worth wiring in as signal number three alongside the Google flag and reviewer silence.

5. On the "beat Reddit and TripAdvisor" goal

Worth being straight about this, since it was the reason for the sweep.

You will not outrank the r/boulder threads on "best pizza boulder" by having better data. Google ranks those threads because people trust other people, and it has spent two years deliberately boosting forum content for exactly these queries. Same with TripAdvisor's review volume.

What the sweep is genuinely worth is different, and better: it makes your pages correct in a way theirs are not. TripAdvisor's own Boulder pages still list Murphy's (closed June 2021) and Catacombs (now License No. 1). Reddit threads recommend restaurants that shut months ago. Your site can be the one that says "Dark Horse closed March 14, 2026, here are six open alternatives" and be right.

That's not how you beat them on the head term. It's how you earn the links and the citations that eventually let you compete, and it's the exact asset the local press will link to.

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Do this

1. Flag Carelli's closed. Reported closing February 18, still live on your site in August.
2. Flag J&L Distilling closed, add TooSteppin Saloon at the same address.
3. Add The Melting Pot and BuffHouse.
4. Put Cosmo's Pizza, Moe's Original BBQ and Dairy Queen (685 30th St) on a watchlist with a monthly recheck. Do not flag them yet, the demolition date is genuinely unclear and guessing wrong is worse than being late.
5. Wire in the two new closure signals: successor-at-same-address (strong, immediate) and address-block neighbor of a confirmed redevelopment closure (weak, flags for review only).
6. Diary the downtown food hall for October. Ten venue pages in one drop.