Restaurant AEO — get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

Roughly 41% of diners under 35 now start their restaurant discovery inside ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity rather than Google. They type 'I have a date tonight in Marylebone — somewhere small, romantic, not Italian' and act on the answer. The restaurants that get named in those answers are getting the bookings.

Restaurant AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is the discipline of making your restaurant the one those AI tools name. It is a different practice from restaurant SEO. Different signals, different content structure, different measurement framework. And right now, it is the lowest-cost-per-cover channel in restaurant marketing.

What Restaurant AEO is, and how it differs from SEO

SEO optimises a restaurant for rankings on Google — a list, a snippet, a map pack. AEO optimises a restaurant for citations inside a generated answer — a paragraph that names you, often with no link clicked. The economics are different: AEO produces fewer impressions, but a far higher trust signal and conversion rate per impression.

How AI tools choose which restaurants to cite

Each large language model has its own retrieval and grounding behaviour, but the signals they share are remarkably consistent. The restaurants that get cited tend to have: a well-maintained Wikipedia or Wikidata entry, mentions in trade press (Time Out, Eater, the FT Weekend), an authoritative restaurant website with clean schema, consistent NAP across the web, a strong Google Business Profile, and content written in a factual, structured style that LLMs can quote.

The content layer that gets restaurants cited

AI tools cite content that is factual, structured and short-form. Long, flowery prose almost never gets quoted. Specific paragraphs that answer a specific question — 'Maison Folle in Marseille seats 14, serves a single tasting menu, opens reservations on the first Monday of each month, average ticket €120' — get quoted constantly. We rewrite the highest-traffic pages of a restaurant's website to feed that style.

Entity optimization — Wikipedia, Wikidata and the citation graph

AI search engines reason about restaurants as entities — a graph of facts, relationships and properties. Restaurants that exist clearly inside that graph (Wikipedia entry, Wikidata Q-number, consistent properties across the web) get cited disproportionately more. We run the entity work: establishing or cleaning the Wikipedia presence, lodging Wikidata properties, and aligning the restaurant's profile across high-authority sources.

AEO measurement — how we track citation rate

We track citation rate across a panel of 240+ prompts per restaurant — 'best restaurants in [city]', 'where to eat near [landmark]', 'date night [neighbourhood]', etc. Monthly we re-run those prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, log citations, and report citation share. The metric we move is citation share, not vague 'AI visibility'.

Restaurant AEO pricing

Restaurant AEO services run as an add-on to an SEO programme (typically $250/month extra) or as a standalone programme starting at $450/month. Includes content rewriting, entity optimisation, schema, citation tracking and a monthly report.