Restaurant guide: get picked on Google

People choose a restaurant in a few seconds, on their phone, often before they ever open your website. This guide shows what they see and what you can fix yourself, most of it in an afternoon.

What people see before they pick you

Search “jollof rice” with the name of your city and look at the top of the page. Google shows three restaurants first, on a map. For each one it shows the star rating, the number of reviews, a price range, the type of food, whether it’s open right now, and one line that explains the match: a dish from the menu (“Menu highlight: jollof rice”), or a sentence from a review that uses the words searched.

Above that list sit filters like “Open now”, “Top rated” and “Accepts reservations”. Tap a restaurant and its profile opens with buttons to order, call, get directions, and tabs for the menu, photos and reviews. Many people decide right there and never visit a website.

Google says it ranks these results on three things: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance, and prominence (how well known you are, which includes your reviews and the websites that link to you). It also says plainly that you can’t pay for a better local ranking (opens in a new tab). Results also change with where the person searching is standing, so what you see on your own phone is not what everyone sees.

Fix these five things first

Own your profile. Claim and verify it on Google Business Profile. If a former manager or an old agency controls it, request ownership: everything else depends on this.
Hours that are right every day. For restaurants, Google wants your dine-in hours as your main hours (opens in a new tab). Takeout, delivery and pickup times go under “More hours”. Wrong hours take you out of “Open now” and send people to a locked door, which turns into bad reviews.
A phone number that gets answered during the hours you show.
A menu and an order link that work on a phone.
Real photos: the front of the restaurant from the street, your dishes, and the inside.

The free Google checklist goes through the rest, starting with what matters most.

People search by dish, so your menu is what connects their search to you.

Use Google’s menu editor. It’s built for food and drink businesses: you can add sections, dishes, descriptions and prices (opens in a new tab). Changes take a day or two to show.
Write dishes the way customers type them. “Thieboudienne”, “jollof rice”, “egusi soup”, “injera”. If your menu only says “House Special No. 3”, nobody will find it. A few words of explanation help new customers: “Thieboudienne (Senegalese fish and rice)”.
Add your own dish names and photos in the Google Maps app. Google says dish names you add come before the ones customers add (opens in a new tab).
Put the same menu on your website, as text. A menu typed on a web page is easy for Google and AI assistants to read; a photo or a PDF of the menu is harder. When I asked ChatGPT for jollof rice nearby, the price it quoted came from a menu on a restaurant’s own website.
Keep prices current. An old price on Google is a small surprise at the counter, and sometimes a review.

Photos

Google asks for photos that are in focus, well lit, and not heavily filtered (opens in a new tab), and notes that a photo of the outside helps people recognize you when they arrive.

The front door from the street, in daylight, so people know where to stop.
Your signature dishes, one dish per photo, near a window if you can.
The inside: tables, the counter, the space for events if you have one.
Your team, if they’re happy to be in it.

Add a few new photos every month. Use only your own photos, never stock images: people want to see the plate they’ll get.

Hours, holidays and closing days

Holidays: set special hours (opens in a new tab) ahead of time for any closure of six days or fewer. Google suggests confirming your hours on public holidays even when they don’t change, so people know they’re right.
Longer closures (renovation, travel): mark the restaurant as temporarily closed instead.
Closing for good or moving: change it the same day on Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and your website. AI assistants repeat whatever your listings still say. When I asked ChatGPT for jollof rice nearby in November 2026, its “top pick” was a restaurant that its own map marked as permanently closed. Old information keeps sending people somewhere, so make sure it sends them to the right place.

Ordering, delivery and reservations

On your profile, the “Order pickup” and “Order delivery” buttons send people to an ordering link: yours, or a delivery app’s.

Add your own ordering link and set it as preferred (opens in a new tab), for pickup and for delivery. On the profiles I checked, the restaurant’s choice shows first, marked “Preferred by business”. Delivery apps that say they work with you are listed automatically; you can hide the ones you don’t use.
Without your own link, the apps fill the space. In one restaurant profile I checked, an ad for a delivery app appeared right under the restaurant’s own buttons. Delivery apps take a cut of each order; your own link keeps the customer, and the money, with you.
New in 2026: Google’s AI assistant in Maps (Ask Maps) can now place takeout orders (opens in a new tab) in the US at restaurants that use Square or Toast. If you use one of them, check that online ordering is set up there.
Reservations: if you take them, connect your booking tool to your profile and make sure it says you take reservations. People can filter the results for “Accepts reservations”.
Catering: if it’s a real part of your business, list it as a service on your profile and give it its own page on your website, with the dishes, the number of people you can serve, and how to ask for a quote.

Choose the right category

Your main category tells Google what kind of restaurant you are. Google asks for as few categories as possible, as specific as possible (opens in a new tab), and not used as keywords.

Pick the most specific one that exists: “West African restaurant” or “African restaurant” rather than just “Restaurant”. There isn’t always one for your exact cuisine; choose the closest.
Add “Caterer” only if you cater.
Keep your business name exactly as it appears on your sign. Adding words like “Best jollof in town” to the name breaks Google’s rules and can get the profile suspended.

Reviews: ask every customer, answer every review

Reviews decide a lot. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey (opens in a new tab) of 1,002 US adults (about local businesses in general, not restaurants only):

74% look for reviews from the last three months;
68% only choose businesses with four stars or more;
47% won’t choose a business with fewer than 20 reviews;
89% expect the owner to reply, and half are put off by generic copy-and-paste replies.

How to ask. Put a QR code that opens your Google review page on the table, the receipt or the takeout bag, and ask at the right moment: when you clear the plates, or when someone picks up an order. Ask everyone, not only the customers who look happy.

What not to do. No discount or free dessert in exchange for a review, and no asking only your happy customers: Google’s rules forbid both (opens in a new tab), and the reviews can be removed. Don’t write reviews for customers either. What they write in their own words is also what Google shows: a review that mentions your jollof rice is the line people see when they search for jollof rice.

How to reply. Short, personal, and specific to what they said. No promotions in replies. For a bad review: thank them, own what went wrong, say what you’ll do, and offer to talk directly. Never share a customer’s private details.

Beyond Google: Yelp, Apple Maps and ChatGPT

More people now ask an AI assistant where to eat. In the same survey, 45% had used ChatGPT or another AI tool to find a local business, up from 6% a year earlier.

Yelp feeds ChatGPT. Yelp says ChatGPT shows its reviews, ratings, photos and business details (opens in a new tab), and people can book through Yelp inside ChatGPT. When I checked, ChatGPT showed one restaurant at 4.0 stars from Yelp while Google showed it at 4.9. Claim your Yelp page, keep it matching Google, and reply to reviews there too.
Apple Maps is the maps app that comes with every iPhone. In BrightLocal’s survey, 27% now read reviews there, up from 14% a year earlier. Apple Business Connect (opens in a new tab) is free, and restaurants can add buttons for the menu, reservations, pickup and delivery.
Local news and directories get read. ChatGPT’s answer cited a local news story about a restaurant’s opening and a directory of African restaurants. Make sure you’re listed in the directories that fit your food, and tell local news when you open, move or host an event.

Nobody can promise what an AI will say about you. What you can do is make sure everything it reads is accurate, complete and the same everywhere.

Your website, kept simple

You don’t need a fancy site. You need one that answers the same questions as your profile, on a phone:

your menu as text, with prices;
a phone number people can tap to call;
your address, hours and a link to order or book;
the type of food and your neighborhood in the page title, for example “Senegalese restaurant in Harlem”.

What takes an afternoon, and what takes months

In an afternoon: claim your profile, fix hours, add the menu and your ordering link, upload real photos, and claim Yelp and Apple Business Connect.

Over the following months: a steady flow of new reviews, replies to every one, fresh photos, and mentions in local news and directories. Google takes time to reflect this. It usually takes months, and nobody can honestly guarantee where you’ll rank.

How to get your restaurant picked on Google