Industries / Restaurants
SEO for a restaurant means making sure Google, Maps and AI tools can answer what a diner asks before they book: what is on the menu and what it costs, when you are open, whether you suit their occasion and diet, and how to book. We checked 80 restaurant websites by hand. 72 wrote their opening times on the page, but only 22 put their hours in structured data.
GetBorvis / Organic visibilityA restaurant is found on Maps, in a booking app, in a friend's message and, more and more, in an AI answer. Your website is still where those answers come from. If the menu, the hours and the booking route are clear there, every other place has something accurate to repeat.
Google lists menus, menu links, opening hours and booking links among what a restaurant's Business Profile can show, and it indexes text PDFs as well as pages. So the job is less about format and more about whether the facts are there, current, and the same everywhere.
Fact From Google's Business Profile guide for restaurants and its list of file types Google can index.
| On the website | Checked by hand (80) | Our checker (95) |
|---|---|---|
| A menu we could find | 70 of 80, plus 7 uncertain | 76 of 95 link a menu page |
| Menu as a PDF | 24 of the 70 | 45 of 95 offer a PDF menu |
| Prices on the menu | 71 of 80 | Not measured |
| Opening or service times written on the page | 72 of 80 | Not measured |
| Opening hours in structured data | 22 of 80 | 32 of 95 |
| Booking through a third-party platform | 70 of 80 | 78 of 95 |
| Dietary or allergy information, or a policy | 51 of 80 | Not measured |
| Restaurant-type structured data | Not measured | 34 of 95 |
| robots.txt names any AI crawler | Not measured | 18 of 93 |
Ours Two independent checks on 16 October 2026. By hand: 80 restaurant websites in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, New York, Boston, Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, Dublin and Cork, with every check recorded as found, not found, uncertain or blocked. "Not found" means not found on the pages we read, not missing from the whole site. Our checker: 98 websites in 13 cities, found through "book a table" and menu searches, so it leans towards restaurants that take online bookings; 95 answered. Both lean towards established, well-known venues. Restaurants are never named.
Every one of the 70 menus we could classify came with prices. Dietary or allergy information turned up on 22 of 24 restaurants with PDF menus and 19 of 41 with menu pages. That does not make PDFs better, but it does mean "convert your PDF" is the wrong first fix. Check that the menu is current, readable as text, and says how to ask about allergies.
72 of 80 wrote their opening or service times on the page. Only 21 of those also put hours in structured data, and our checker found hours markup on 32 of 95. Write dine-in hours on the page, mark them up to match, and keep your Google Business Profile the same, including holiday hours.
70 of 80 used a third-party booking platform. When we asked an AI tool for a birthday dinner, its answer cited two restaurant websites and three booking or venue platform pages. A platform is not a fault. Make sure your site, your profile and your platform listing agree on hours, party sizes and policies.
51 of 80 had dietary or allergy information, or a clear policy to ask staff. In research by the UK Food Standards Agency, a quarter of adults with food hypersensitivities did not see allergen information the last time they ate out. A short, owner-approved line on how you handle allergies helps both the diner and every place that repeats your details.
Study Food Standards Agency: 767 adults with food hypersensitivities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, published 7 October 2025. The AI answer was one recorded answer on 16 October 2026, not a ranking.
Keep the design. We check that the current menu can be read as text, whether it is a page or a PDF, that it is dated or clearly current, and that set menus, tasting menus and group menus say what they cost and when they run.
Diners and Google need the same answer. We check that dine-in hours are written on the page, match your Google Business Profile, sit in your structured data, and that holiday and special hours are updated before the holiday, not after.
A booking platform is not a problem. We check that your website, your Google profile and your platform listing point to the same place, show the same party sizes and policies, and that walk-in-only venues say so plainly.
Birthdays, private dining, eight friends on a Saturday. We check that party thresholds, set menus, deposits and the way to ask are on the website, so nobody has to phone to find out whether to phone.
Why old prices can linger in Google and AI answers after a menu changes is in we updated the menu, so why do answers show old prices? For restaurants outside the city centre, why you rank in one suburb and not the next covers how Maps decides who to show.
We plan and specify the search work for one venue at a time: the menu, the hours, the booking route and the profile. Your team or your web designer makes the changes. Anything about allergens or dietary suitability is approved by the people who cook the food. We do not invent reviews or promise that an AI tool will recommend you.
Send your website and the one thing you most want diners to find. We will reply with where you stand against the restaurants we checked, and the first thing worth fixing.
…it was worth gold!!Founder of Notum Learn, a SaaS company we audited