SEO for restaurants: 27 Italian sites, measured

The numbers, before the explanations

The menu is there, but the machine can't find it

Fourteen points between the SEO median and the GEO one. The explanation lies in how these sites are built: the menu is often a PDF or an image, the hours sit in a widget, the address is in the footer as plain text. For a person everything works. For an assistant that has to answer «is it open tonight? do they serve gluten-free?» there is nothing to read.

The flaws, in order of how many sites have them

• 100%

  No date showing how up to date the page isMedium

  An assistant choosing which source to cite also looks at how fresh it is. «Updated October 2026» written on the page, and declared in the structured data, shows that someone looks after it. Without it, the page could be five years old, and with equal content the one with the date wins.

• 100%

  The site doesn't answer the questions people ask out loudLow

  «Where can you eat fresh fish in Naples on Sunday evening?» is a real question, asked to an assistant. If there is no sentence on the site that resembles it, there is nothing to cite.

• 96%

  Nobody signs the siteMedium

  Who cooks, for how long, with what idea. For a model, content with no author could have been written by anyone, and it is worth less than a signed one. For a customer, it is the difference between a restaurant and a storefront.

• 96%

  No coordinatesLow

  Latitude and longitude in the schema remove any ambiguity about where you are, and cost two lines. For a restaurant on a street with a common name they make the difference.

• 93%

  No professional schemaHigh

  Not even the generic type that tells a machine what your trade is. Without it, it has to be inferred from the words, and the words on a restaurant site almost always talk about atmosphere, not cuisine.

• 93%

  It reads like a brochure, not like a personMedium

  «Refined setting where tradition and innovation meet» is not a sentence anyone will ever search for. «We make tortellini by hand every morning» is.

• 93%

  The page doesn't answer the question right awayMedium

  Assistants cite the sentence that answers, not the whole page. The first lines should say who you are, what you do and for whom in plain words, before the slogans, the photos and the menu. If the answer arrives after three screens, the assistant takes someone else's.

• 93%

  The usual questions are not written anywhereLow

  Can you bring a dog? Is there a gluten-free menu? Is there parking? These are the calls you get every evening. Written as questions and answers, and declared they become the most direct way to get cited by an assistant.

The three things to start with

1. 1
   Put the address in the structured data. Don't move it out of the footer: add it in JSON-LD too, with hours and phone. It is the fix that earns the most points for the time it takes, and without it «near me» search can't see you.
2. 2
   Write the menu as text. If today it is a PDF or an image, for a machine it doesn't exist. A page with the dishes written out is the front door to every question about what you cook.
3. 3
   Answer the phone questions in writing. Dog, gluten, parking, August hours. The same things you say twenty times a week, written once and declared as questions and answers.

How we measured

• How many sites28 on the list, 27 reached, 1 did not respond even on the second attempt.
• How many pagesUp to 5 pages per site, starting from the home page.
• With whatThe same function that analyzes your site when you press «Analyze for free». No hand-assigned scores.
• How they were chosenBy searching Google for «restaurant» and «trattoria» together with the names of seven Italian cities, and taking the venues' sites, not the directories. They are therefore among those Google already shows: not the worst in the sector, the top of the list.
• What we do not publishThe names. Measuring a public site is what the product does every day; publishing the report card with the name on it is something else.

Twenty-seven sites are not a census of Italian restaurants, and the way we chose them matters: they come from search results, that is, from venues that already have a polished site. If even among these the median is 52, the picture of the sector is no better than that.

Questions