Studies

The Monument Visibility Study, 2026

Small towns build monuments to be found. This study asks whether they actually are, and for how long.

We have checked the Google Business Profile of more than a hundred and thirty roadside monuments and giant statues across thirty eight states, resolving each one at its street address rather than trusting a name search. The pattern that came back was not the one we expected.

What we have found so far

• Roughly four out of five of the giant statues we checked were sitting unclaimed, meaning nobody locally holds the listing and nobody sees what it draws.
• Nobody knows who runs these listings. Not one organisation we guessed at first turned out to be the right owner. A county tourism specialist did not know who managed the landmark in her own county.
• Listings send visitors to the wrong place. We found town monuments whose website field pointed at the county, at the state tourism department, at a records site and at Facebook, rather than at the town that owns them.
• Duplicate pins split the search. Several towns have two listings for one object, one carrying all the reviews and one completely empty.
• Addresses drift and nobody can fix them. One listing renders raw coordinates and a highway number from the wrong state. Another sits on a street that was renamed years ago.

The two questions the data is meant to answer

Both matter more to a town than they do to us.

How many years of lift a monument actually buys, so a council knows what it is getting before it builds one.

Whether a repaint or an anniversary genuinely resets that lift, so upkeep money can be argued for as marketing money rather than maintenance.

Read the study (PDF)

Take part

The study gets better the more towns are in it. If your town has a monument, a statue, a water tower with a face on it or anything else people drive out of their way to photograph, we would like it in the data.

Joining costs nothing. We also manage these listings for towns that would rather not do it themselves, and that work is what funds the research.

Monument and landmark listing management

Next

Two things are in progress. A town level audit method that maps every civic listing a small town owns, not just its monument, after we ran the first one and found the city hall itself unclaimed. And a first look at whether a restoration shows up in review text before it shows up anywhere else.