TheFork and TripAdvisor Are Now Inside AI Responses

When an AI recommends your restaurant, where does it send the customer to book? More and more often, to TheFork or TripAdvisor. Not to your own site.

Why AIs love aggregators

Models prefer structured sources, packed with reviews, that they can trust. TheFork, TripAdvisor and Google concentrate thousands of reviews, menus, photos, opening hours. Everything an AI needs to cross-check and answer without hesitation. The result is simple, they sit on a big chunk of restaurant answers.

The hidden cost

A booking through TheFork is a commission. A booking through your own site is zero. If AIs push 80% of your "AI customers" toward an aggregator, you are paying for visibility you could be capturing directly. Same playbook as Booking fifteen years ago in hotels, and we all know how that ended for margins.

RestoRank measures one thing specifically, the own site vs. aggregator share. Out of the responses that cite a source, what fraction points to your domain?

How to take the direct link back

You will not make aggregators disappear, and that is not the point. The goal is to make your site strong enough to be cited next to them:

1. Full schema.org/Restaurant structured data (menu, FAQ, reviews, opening hours, geo). AIs cite what they can read.
2. Reviews collected on your own site (official widget), on top of the platforms.
3. A menu in HTML, not a PDF that crawlers cannot read.
4. A FAQ page covering reservations, dietary needs, directions, parking. The questions AIs love to pull from.
5. NAP consistency. Name, address, phone identical everywhere, so the AI ties every source back to one entity, yours.

Measure before you move

Before you spend a euro, know where you stand. On how many responses is your site cited vs. an aggregator? RestoRank gives you that ratio, platform by platform, with the trend over time. Then you decide how many covers you still want to hand over to the platforms.