More and more people are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI assistants for restaurant recommendations. Find out if your restaurant is visible and how to improve your presence.
"ChatGPT, recommend a good restaurant in Florence for tonight." This question is asked thousands of times a day. Tourists, especially international ones, increasingly use AI assistants to choose where to eat. If your restaurant doesn't appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity responses, you're becoming invisible to a growing share of potential guests.
25%
of local searches will go through AI assistants by 2026
Search is changing radically. Instead of scrolling through 10 Google results, more and more people ask an AI assistant directly and get a conversational response with 3-5 specific recommendations. It's estimated that by the end of 2026, 25% of local searches will go through AI assistants. For restaurants in tourist cities, this percentage is already higher. The question isn't whether to adapt, but how quickly.
The first step is simple: ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to recommend a restaurant in your area and cuisine type. Try different phrasings: "best Italian restaurant in [city]", "where to eat well in [neighborhood]", "romantic restaurant in [city]". If your venue never appears, you have an AI visibility problem that needs to be addressed.
Want a quick and thorough check? Use our free AI visibility checker to find out if and how your restaurant appears in AI assistant responses.
Start with the basics: complete your Google Business profile 100% with description, photos, menu, hours, and attributes. Respond to all reviews (positive and negative) to signal an active profile. Make sure your website has an updated menu with dish names and prices. Add schema.org "Restaurant" structured data to your site. Seek mentions on local food blogs and guides, which AIs use as authoritative sources.
Your Google Maps profile is the foundation of AI visibility. Use our Google Maps grading tool to verify your profile is complete and optimized.
Maestro contributes to your AI visibility in an indirect but powerful way. A restaurant that always answers the phone generates more reservations, more visits, and consequently more positive reviews. Positive reviews are the most influential factor for AI visibility. Additionally, Maestro ensures the information provided over the phone (hours, menu, address) is always consistent with your online profile. Try the free demo and build your AI presence one guest at a time.
Why we know this
We built Maestro's AI Visibility Checker by testing how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity respond to real questions about Italian restaurants. Every week we run dozens of queries on AI answer engines to understand who gets cited and who does not, and the patterns we see are very clear. The techniques described here are the ones that genuinely shift citations in LLM responses.