Whether Google can discover, read and understand the restaurant.
Google's new AI report lists impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates — an impressions instrument, not a traffic one, and a missing click figure is no failure.
A dish photograph set as a CSS background is excluded from image indexing outright, however sharp it is, and the decisions that settle the rest are made when the site is built.
A new duty obliges Google to rank organic results, and AI answers, on objective criteria. It sets the rule of the gate, not the winner, and a site's missing signals still cost it.
An outdated address survives on surfaces that refresh at different speeds; the one Google states a window for usually takes about ten minutes, but in some cases up to thirty days.
Typing the restaurant's number into a Google post breaks a rule most owners have never read, and the button offered instead risks ringing out during service.
A clean, indexed site can still lose its own brand search to a directory page whose menu is as current as the last copy, and whose booking button may not be the restaurant's.
Reopening week is when the Google listing matters most, and exactly when the previous owner still controls it. The three-day clock, and the duplicate that is invisible.
A new page can wait days or weeks to be crawled, and a seasonal menu has only six weeks to sell. Nothing tells the restaurant whether a search engine was ever told it exists.
Google withdrew star eligibility in September 2019 from a restaurant's own review markup. An undisclosed incentive behind those ratings adds legal exposure to the wasted effort.
A listing that shows a bare domain and no icon loses the click to a directory charging commission on the same table. Google will not change a wrong site name on request.
The pin vanishes on a Friday, taking the hours, the phone number and four years of reviews. The walk-in trade is lost while the appeal runs.
Last week's numbers arrive three different ways, so a quiet fortnight gets blamed on the wrong thing and the spend moves off a channel that was working.
