/
Visibility
Everything an assistant knows about your venue comes from public sources. There are five of them, and with almost every source someone besides you can change something.
Read time
6
min
Written by
Team SOUS
Published
Key takeaways
This article in a few bites
An AI assistant knows only what is publicly recorded about your venue: your business profile, your listings, your reviews and your own site.
Your own website and menu are the only source nobody else can reach, and often the source that has gone the longest without an update.
A menu published as a pdf or as an image puts not a word of what you sell into the text of your page.
Google Maps lets logged-in users suggest an edit to your place details, so checking a profile is not a one-off job.
A contradictory detail costs you more than a missing one, because nothing looks wrong.
Everything an AI assistant knows about your venue comes from sources that are public. It reads your business profile on Google and Maps, your listings on maps and ordering platforms, your reviews and your own website. If one profile has your kitchen down as Greek and your site calls it Mediterranean, the assistant builds its answer about you with both of those details sitting side by side.
You can check which sources about your venue are public, and for each one what it says and who is allowed to change it. No provider publishes which details a language model weighs more heavily internally, and that is also the part you cannot do anything about.
Which sources feed an answer about your venue?
There are five kinds of sources, and with almost every kind someone besides you can change something.
Source | What it says about you | Who updates it |
|---|---|---|
Your business profile on Google and Maps | Name, address, category, opening hours, phone number, photos, link to ordering or booking | You, Google itself, and guests who suggest an edit |
Listings on other maps and guides | The same basic details, in the version that platform picked up at some point | You per platform, or the platform from another source |
Your profile on takeaway and delivery platforms | Menu, prices, delivery area, and the hours in which you take orders | You in the partner portal, which usually holds platform prices |
Your reviews | What guests write about dishes, waiting time and service, plus your replies underneath | Guests, and you in your replies |
Your own website and menu | What kind of venue you are, where you are, when you are open, what you serve and what it costs | You, or nobody since the site went live |
Your own website is the one source nobody else can reach. If your menu sits there as a PDF or as an image, not a single word of what you sell ends up in the text of your page.
Who updates those sources besides you?
Google Maps lets any logged-in user suggest an edit to your place details: the name, the attributes, and the fields that are still empty. Google reviews those suggestions and rejects anything that tries to change a business significantly. So your opening hours are not a field only you can reach, and a guest who means well can just as easily put something there that is wrong.
There is a second rule on top of that, and it weighs heavier as soon as you have more than one location. Google’s own guidelines require you to represent your business the way it appears in the real world on the front of the building, and state that there may be only one profile per business. A move, or a location that was once created as a separate profile, gives you two versions of the same business, and with that two answers about you that exist side by side.
Why a contradictory detail costs you more than a missing one
A missing listing is a task: you create it and you fill it in. The harder case is when everything is filled in and the sources contradict each other, because then nothing looks wrong and you cannot see which version a guest gets.
With eight locations, five kinds of sources per location comes to forty places where something about you is written, so one adjusted Christmas week is dozens of edits. Skip a few and a guest is standing at a closed door at 21.30 because one platform still had the old hours. That guest writes a review, and that review is itself a source the next answer gets built from.
What restaurant SEO still has to do with this
For years, restaurant SEO was a story about your own website: text, headings, loading time, links. That work stays, and the details about your venue that live outside your site come with it. The same fields that decide whether you come up high in the map also decide what ends up in an AI answer, because it is the same public information with more readers.
That changes your priorities: correct details in all the places they appear come before a new blog page, and a complete profile per location comes before a campaign pointing at a half-finished one.
What you can check yourself today
Search for your own venue on Google and compare four fields against what is actually true: address, opening hours, phone number and category. Do this per location.
Check whether a second profile of the same venue exists. Search on the old name or the old address. If you find two, that is the thing to sort out before anything else.
Open your profile on every ordering platform you appear on. Is the menu still right, are there dishes in it you no longer make, and do the ordering hours match your kitchen hours?
Check the menu on your own site. Is it there as text, or as a PDF and an image?
Read your last ten reviews and see which ones have no reply underneath. An unanswered complaint about wrong opening hours often points to a source that is still wrong.
Ask an AI assistant yourself. Ask for a restaurant in your street or for your type of kitchen in your city, and see what comes back about your venue.
Those six steps cost you an afternoon per location and give you a list of what is wrong. What they do not solve is the second round, three weeks later, when a platform has picked something up from a source you had already corrected.
What SOUS Spotlight takes off your hands
SOUS Spotlight keeps your details identical across more than 45 platforms and search engines, per location, and poweredbysous.com names Google, Maps, ChatGPT and Claude among them. You change your opening hours, your menu or your photos in one place and they carry over to the rest. In the AI dashboard and management portal you see per location how your venue comes across, you get twenty content suggestions a week and a report every two weeks. Reviews are answered automatically in your own tone, and you set per star rating what may go out automatically: the five-star ones yes, the one and the two you handle yourself. You start with onboarding by a specialist and keep a dedicated account manager after that.
The price is 90 euros per month per location with annual billing, or 129 euros per month if you pay monthly.
What that does in the numbers, per venue using it: BISOUS sees 189% more map views and 31% more menu clicks, Laymous 73% more map views, 152% more menu clicks and 44% more route requests, and Schmidt Zeevis 25% more map views, 29% more route requests and 11% more calls from search results.
If you want to know where your venue stands right now, run the free AI scan at ai.poweredbysous.com. You fill in the name of your venue and your average spend per guest.
Frequently asked questions
Where does ChatGPT get information about my restaurant?
From public sources about your venue: your business profile on Google and Maps, your listings on other maps and platforms, your reviews and your own website. How an assistant like that weighs those sources against each other has not been published. What is in them, you can check and correct yourself.
Is restaurant SEO the same as appearing in AI answers?
No, though the work overlaps for the most part, because both lean on the same public details about your venue. The difference is in the outcome: with restaurant SEO you appear somewhere in a list of results, in an AI answer you either get named or you do not.
Can someone else change my details on Google?
Yes. Google Maps lets logged-in users suggest edits to your place details, and Google reviews those itself afterwards. Checking a profile is therefore not a one-off job.
Does my menu need to be text on my site?
Yes. Put it up as a PDF or a photo and the page itself carries not a word about your dishes and your prices, even though a guest reads a menu like that without any trouble.
Does this work with multiple locations too?
Yes, and with several locations it adds up quickly, because every location has its own profile and its own listings. SOUS Spotlight is therefore billed per location: 90 euros per month per location with annual billing, 129 euros with monthly billing.
Do I need an agency for this?
No. You do the first round yourself with those six steps. Keeping it up to date is the part that keeps coming back: across dozens of platforms, per location, every time you change something.
