Someone on a sidewalk at seven on a Friday is not opening ten tabs. They ask an AI where to eat nearby and walk into the name that comes back. This checker asks Google's Gemini, with live web search, the questions those diners ask, then shows whether your restaurant is named or which places got named instead.
Run the free tool ↓Enter the restaurant the way your Google listing spells it, the city or neighborhood diners actually say, and the food in diner words, such as Thai restaurant, brunch, or late night food, rather than the word restaurant alone. The website field is optional, the answer takes a few moments to come back, and there is no email wall.
Prefer a full page? Open the AI Visibility Checker tool here.
It asks three questions a diner works through before picking a place: who are the best here, which should I go with, and who is top rated on reviews. The third does the heavy lifting in this trade. An answer about a restaurant is mostly a summary of what strangers wrote about your food, so the dishes reviewers name become the dishes the AI names back.
Back comes a plain verdict, one of AI is not recommending you, you are only partly visible, or AI is recommending you, a count of the answers that named you, the places named instead, ranked, and for each question the answer text plus its source domains.
Read the source chips first. In this trade they are rarely restaurant websites: expect review platforms, delivery and reservation apps, a city magazine roundup. If your domain is not there, odds are nothing on your own site was an input. Then rerun with one word changed: tacos, brunch, gluten free, and private dining return four different sets of names. Method and limits live on the generic AI Visibility Checker page.
There is no industry average here, and nobody has one worth quoting. The only comparison that means anything is the list of places named ahead of you in your own city.
A strong read: named in all three answers, your own domain among the sources, and the answer describing you the way you would, down to cuisine, price band, and what you are known for.
A weak read is blunt. Invisible, none of the three naming you, a competitor list you could walk to. The cause is usually visible on your own phone. A menu that exists only as a PDF is a file, not a page. Hours buried in a booking widget are hours no answer engine can read.
The middle case: named, but described wrong. The answer files a chef-driven kitchen as a sports bar, quotes a dish you cut two seasons ago, or says you take no reservations. And if a question shows a check mark while your name is nowhere in the visible text, remember the tool shows an excerpt of a longer answer: the mention can sit past the clip.
Say a 60-seat neighborhood Italian place, invented here, full every Saturday. Its menu is a seasonal PDF and ordering runs through a delivery app widget. Entered as Italian restaurant plus the city: verdict invisible, zero of three answers naming it, six places listed instead, every source chip a review or reservation platform. The room is full and the site contributed nothing.
Now imagine a taqueria known for one thing. Entered as tacos, it is named in all three with its own domain among the sources. Entered as the plain trade word for the same city, it drops to one of three, and the answer files it as a quick lunch stop, true enough, and leaves out the dinner service it wants to grow.
Neither is a client, and neither hands you a fix list. It shows the gap and who is filling it. Closing it is ordinary work: the menu as readable text with dish names, dietary wording, and prices; kitchen hours current and written out; a page for brunch, the patio, or private events; LocalBusiness and FAQ schema; an llms.txt file; AI crawlers unblocked; listings that agree. That is AI search optimization.
A diner is not researching. They are filtering, and the filter runs in order.
An answer engine can only repeat what is stated plainly and agrees across your site, your Google Business Profile, and the platforms carrying your name. Text, not a PDF. Kitchen hours stated apart from bar hours, because they differ and diners get burned by the gap.
When every source in your report belongs to a marketplace, that marketplace's version of your menu, prices, and hours is what gets read back to the diner, beside the competitors it also lists. Reviews corroborate you; your own domain is what gets quoted. The full argument for the trade sits on the restaurant page and on local SEO.
The checker is free and stays free, one of more than 50 free tools we publish, none behind an email wall. What it points at is not free: it is your hours or hired ones.
Our published ranges: a custom website build runs $3,500 to $12,000+ one time. Ongoing SEO or local search work runs $1,500 to $3,500 per month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 per month in competitive metros or for multi-location groups. One room in a small city usually sits in the lower band; a tourist metro, where hotel guides and travel sites crowd every answer, sits higher. Everything is month to month, no long-term contract, and you own the site, the content, and the accounts.
Ownership deserves a look here. Restaurant sites are often built inside a point of sale, ordering, or reservation vendor's bundle, which can leave the domain and the analytics in that vendor's account. Check whose name is on the registration before you spend on it. See also what SEO costs a restaurant, what a restaurant website costs, the report card for restaurants, and what you should pay.
Both, in separate runs. The plain trade word returns the broadest answer and is usually the hardest to appear in. Cuisine, daypart, and occasion each return their own names: ramen, brunch, happy hour, gluten free, private dining for twelve. Owning the ramen question while missing brunch changes what you fix first.
Common, and it is the finding. The answer about your food was assembled out of other people's descriptions of you, so what those listings say about your menu, prices, and hours is what the diner hears. Stay on the platforms if they earn their keep, and make your own site an input too.
Google's Gemini, with live web search. Gemini is the engine behind Google's AI Overviews, the largest AI answer surface, so it is the one to check first. ChatGPT and Perplexity are not queried here, and neither are the map and travel apps diners also use.
Not the recommendation itself. Google does sell ads in and around AI answers, so paid placement exists on those screens and beside them, and any restaurant can buy it. Delivery and reservation platforms sell promoted spots too. What no budget buys is the organic answer, and which restaurant it names comes down to what the models can find and confirm about you.
One run per place, using that location's own city or neighborhood, because that is how diners ask and the answers split by geography. Run the truck as its own business, since it competes on a different question. Expect uneven results under one brand, and note the tool's daily limit.
AI Visibility Checker: full tool page and methodology · Marketing for restaurants · SEO cost for restaurants · Website Report Card for Restaurants · What Should You Pay? for Restaurants · All free tools
Run it once for each thing you want to be known for, and if you want a human read on the result, we will build a free concept mockup of your restaurant site and say what we would change. Orlando based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.