Get suggested when diners ask where to eat.
Diners ask assistants for the best tacos nearby, somewhere quiet for a date, or a kitchen still open after ten. Speak Local shows which places get named, and what the assistant reads before it picks.
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How does a restaurant get recommended by AI assistants and Google Maps?
By giving machines the facts diners ask about, in text they can read: cuisine, dishes, prices, hours, reservations and dietary options, on your website and your Google Business Profile, kept current. Reviews that name dishes and occasions do the rest, because assistants summarize them when they recommend a place. Mark it up as a Restaurant, or the closer fit such as CafeOrCoffeeShop or BarOrPub, with a link to the menu.
Updated 9 October 2026
What do diners ask before they choose?
Diners ask about occasions, cravings and logistics. These six are worth tracking:
- Best brunch near me
- Quiet restaurant in your city for a date night
- Gluten-free pizza in your city
- Restaurants open after 10pm near me
- Where do locals eat in your neighborhood?
- Is your restaurant good for large groups?
These are examples to adapt. Put the ones that bring you business to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini on a weekly or monthly round, and each answer is recorded as named, cited or absent, with whoever was named in your place. How AI answers are tracked
What do Google and AI assistants weigh for a restaurant?
They weigh what you serve, when you’re open and what people say about it.
A menu machines can read
A menu that exists only as a photo or a PDF is hard to quote. A plain HTML menu with dishes, short descriptions and prices is something an assistant can repeat when someone asks where to get a particular dish.
Hours that are right, especially on holidays
Wrong hours send diners to a closed door. Keep regular, holiday and special hours current on your profile and your site, and make sure the two agree.
Reviews that name the dish
Assistants summarize what reviewers say. “The birria tacos are the best in town” is a sentence that can end up in an answer; a star rating on its own isn’t.
Attributes and occasions
Outdoor seating, vegan options, reservations, private dining, live music. Set them on your profile and say them on your site, because they’re the words diners use in their questions.
Which schema should a restaurant use?
Restaurant, or the closer fit: CafeOrCoffeeShop, BarOrPub, Bakery, Brewery, Winery and IceCreamShop are all schema.org food establishments. Add what diners filter on: cuisine, price range, reservations and the menu.
Speak Local’s scanner reads every one of them as entity schema on your homepage.
Worth checking: that hasMenu points at an HTML page rather than a PDF, and that the hours in your schema change when your holiday hours do. A marked-up time that disagrees with your profile gives an assistant two answers to pick from.
servesCuisinein the words diners usehasMenupointing at an HTML menu pageacceptsReservations, or a link to where they’re takenopeningHoursSpecification, updated before every holiday
Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator before it goes live.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Restaurant",
"@id": "https://www.example.com/#restaurant",
"name": "Example Taqueria",
"url": "https://www.example.com/",
"telephone": "+1-555-0100",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "100 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Your City",
"addressRegion": "ST",
"postalCode": "00000",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"servesCuisine": ["Mexican", "Tacos"],
"priceRange": "$$",
"hasMenu": "https://www.example.com/menu",
"acceptsReservations": true,
"openingHoursSpecification": [
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Sunday"],
"opens": "11:00",
"closes": "22:00"
},
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Friday", "Saturday"],
"opens": "11:00",
"closes": "23:30"
}
]
}Where should a restaurant start?
Do these in order. Most of the work takes an evening.
-
Put the menu in HTML
Keep the PDF for printing, but publish the menu as a page too, with dishes, descriptions and prices.
-
Check hours everywhere before every holiday
Your profile, your site, and any directory or booking app that shows them.
-
Fill in your profile’s attributes
Dine-in, takeout, outdoor seating, dietary options, accessibility, reservations: whatever’s true.
-
Reply to reviews, especially the critical ones
Briefly and graciously. Future diners read the reply as closely as the complaint.
-
Track the occasion questions
“Best brunch”, “date night” and “open late” in your neighborhood, on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
How does Speak Local help a restaurant?
Every plan includes all of it. See the full platform for how the pillars combine into one score.
What it looks like for a restaurant
Six screens from the workspace of an example restaurant, as they look in the app. Choose one to see it.
An example workspace for a fictional restaurant. The site audit and the competitors’ scores are real scans of test sites; the rankings, answers and traffic are sample data. Swipe the screen to see all of it.
Common questions
Is a PDF menu bad for SEO?
Which reviews do AI assistants read for restaurants?
How do we get into the “best of” lists assistants quote?
Should we respond to bad reviews?
Does this work for a bar, brewery or coffee shop?
See where a restaurant like yours stands.
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