What should a restaurant's Google listing have?
Someone looking for a place to eat decides in a minute, hungry and comparing three options. What they look at on your listing, in what order, and what makes them scroll past.
The decision takes a minute
Nobody researches a restaurant. Someone looking for a place to eat opens the map, sees three or four cards and compares the same things on each: the photos, the rating, the price and whether it's open now.
Your Google listing — the Business Profile, which many people still call Google My Business — is that card. Whatever isn't visible there at first glance doesn't exist for that customer.
The menu, as text and with prices
Google lets you enter the menu dish by dish, with a name, a description and a price, plus a link to your full menu. Almost everyone uploads a single photo of the printed menu instead.
The photo works for someone patient enough to zoom in. The text works for everything else: it's what makes you show up when someone searches for a dish by name, and the only thing an AI assistant can read.
And keep it current. An old price produces the worst review there is: «Google said something different».
Photos of dishes, not of an empty room
- Your best-selling dish, close up and well lit. It's the photo that decides; put it first.
- The storefront with the sign. It's what lets people recognise the place when they arrive.
- The dining room with people in it. An empty room says the exact opposite of what you want.
- Recent photos. Your customers upload their own and you can't pick them; what you can do is have more and better ones than they do.
Kitchen hours, not just door hours
Your main hours say when you're open. But if the kitchen closes at nine and the door at ten, the customer who arrived at quarter past nine leaves annoyed, and rightly so.
The listing has «more hours» for exactly this: kitchen, delivery and takeout can each have their own. Holidays are entered separately, as special hours.
Reservations, delivery and attributes
If you take reservations or online orders, the listing can show the links. Check which ones appear: Google sometimes adds delivery-app links on its own, and you can mark your own channel as preferred if you have one.
Attributes are the checkboxes Google uses to filter: outdoor seating, vegetarian options, good for kids, dogs allowed, accepts reservations, takeout. An empty checkbox drops you from the filtered search even if you do offer it.
What makes you quotable by an AI
Our study did not measure restaurants, so we have no figure of our own for your trade. What we did see in the four categories we measured is where assistants get their answers: pages with text — guides, directories, the business's own site — and none from Google Maps.
For a restaurant that means a page of your own with the menu written out, the type of cuisine, the neighbourhood and the hours. Inside an image or a scanned PDF, nobody but a person can read that information.
Want to know where you stand today? Visquore audits your digital presence with verified Google data, compares you against your real competitors, and checks whether AI assistants recommend you.
Run my audit →Frequently asked questions
- Should I upload the menu as a photo or as text?
- Both. The photo serves the customer who wants to see it as printed; the text, dish by dish, is what gets you found when people search for a dish by name and what AI assistants can read.
- Which primary category should I pick?
- The most specific one that truly describes you: «Italian restaurant» says more than «restaurant». Whatever else you offer goes in additional categories. Don't add categories for things you don't do: they attract the wrong customer and end in a bad review.
- Do I have to be on delivery apps to show up on Google?
- No. The listing is independent of those apps. If you're on them, Google may show their links; if you aren't, you still appear on the map with your phone number and your own ordering channel.
Keep reading
When you ask matters more than how you ask. What works in a restaurant, what's against the rules, and how many you actually need.
Most guides repeat the same advice: ask for reviews, post photos. There's something more concrete and much faster — the empty checkboxes on your listing that quietly drop you out of filtered searches.