All states›Methodology

How we collect and check our data

BobaAtlas lists 6,885 boba tea shops in 1,977 cities and towns across 50 states and the District of Columbia. This page explains where each listing comes from and what we do to keep it accurate.

Where the listings come from

Business names, addresses, phone numbers and websites start from open geodata: the Overture Maps Foundation places dataset, which includes Foursquare OS Places and OpenStreetMap contributions. We keep bubble tea and boba shops, milk tea and fruit tea shops, tea cafes whose menu is built around boba, and Korean shaved-ice dessert cafes that serve boba; restaurants that list boba as a side item, coffee chains, grocery stores and wholesale tea suppliers are left out. We remove duplicates (the same name and street in the same city) and drop businesses that are reported closed or that asked to be removed.

A city gets its own page when it has at least two boba tea shops; towns with a single listing appear on their state page, so no page is built around one business.

What a listing shows

93% of listings have a phone number and 64% link to the business's own website. Opening hours appear only where the business or its owner has published them. We do not show ratings or reviews, and we do not copy text from other directories.

How features are marked

Matcha and bingsu are marked when the shop's name or business category says so, or when its own website names them. Fruit tea, Thai tea and slushies are marked only when the shop's own website names them. We read the site text with fixed word rules and check samples by hand. A shop without such words is left unmarked rather than guessed. These marks are applied by software — name rules, wording rules run over each business's own website, and an AI model that reads that website — not written by hand. A mark from a website is kept only when the wording is found on the page, so a business without a mark may still offer the service — call to check.

Corrections from owners

Owners can correct their listing for free — new hours, a changed phone number, a moved address, services they offer. Corrections are applied and the listing is marked "Updated by the owner" with the month. Owners can also ask for a listing to be removed, and the removal is permanent. Write to contact@bobaatlas.com.

How lists are ordered

Top 10 lists and the order of each city page follow how complete a listing is — website, phone, hours, services — and whether the owner has checked it. No business can pay for a position.

How often it is updated

The directory is rebuilt from the current data every night, so owner corrections usually appear within a day. The underlying geodata is refreshed from new Overture releases.