SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Snap Inc. launched Snapchat Place Loyalty, a Snap Map feature that recognizes users who are among the most frequent visitors to specific places, for its global community, April 22, 2026.
The feature is designed to make repeat visits more visible inside Snap Map, turning everyday routines such as coffee runs, restaurant stops and airport visits into private rankings that users can share if they choose.
How Snapchat Place Loyalty works
Snapchat said in its Place Loyalty announcement that the feature ranks users based on visits to a place over the past year. Users who land in the top 25% of visitors to a location may see a Top Visitor badge on Snap Map.
The badge system has three tiers:
- Gold: Top 1% of visitors
- Silver: Top 10% of visitors
- Bronze: Top 25% of visitors
When users tap a Top Visitor badge, they can see their ranking, category callouts and a sticker that can be shared with friends. For brands and chains, Snap says visits are aggregated across locations, meaning repeated visits to different branches of the same business can still count toward loyalty status.
Snap Map gets another social discovery layer
Snapchat Place Loyalty is the latest step in Snap Map’s shift from a simple location-sharing tool into a discovery and identity feature. Snap Map first arrived in 2017 as a way for users to share their location with friends and explore public Snaps from around the world, according to early coverage of the Snap Map launch.
That foundation expanded in 2021, when Snapchat added My Places on Snap Map, a feature that connected users with more than 30 million businesses and offered tabs for visited, favorite and popular places. The new loyalty badges build on that same behavior by rewarding repeat visits rather than only helping users find where to go next.
Snap also moved further into personal location history in 2024 with Footsteps, which lets users track places they have explored through Snap Map. Place Loyalty now adds a more competitive and shareable layer to that local activity.
Privacy remains central to Snapchat Place Loyalty
Snap says Place Loyalty rankings are visible only to the individual user unless that person chooses to share a sticker. The company also says location sharing on Snap Map is off by default, precise location is not shared with advertisers and users can manage sharing through friend selections, Ghost Mode or by turning location sharing off.
A Snapchat Support page adds that a Top Visitor trophy may still appear while Ghost Mode is enabled because Ghost Mode hides a user’s location from friends on the Map, but does not turn off location sharing with Snapchat if device-level permission is still granted.
What the badges could mean for brands
For businesses, Snapchat Place Loyalty could give regular customers a new reason to engage with locations on Snap Map. The feature does not create a public leaderboard, but shareable stickers may help turn frequent visits into social proof, especially for cafes, restaurants, entertainment venues, airports and retail chains.
Snap Map has more than 435 million monthly active users, according to Snap, making the feature a potentially valuable bridge between digital engagement and real-world foot traffic. For users, the appeal is simpler: Snap Map can now show not just where friends are and what places are nearby, but which places have become part of a user’s routine.
With Snapchat Place Loyalty, Snap is turning repeat visits into a badge-based experience that feels familiar to longtime social app users while keeping rankings private by default. The result is a feature that blends location, loyalty and self-expression without making a user’s favorite places public unless they decide to share them.
