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Independent restaurants · Basque Country · Béarn · France
Restaurant SEO: more direct bookings, fewer platform commissions
We do not negotiate your platforms' commissions. We reduce the share of your revenue that goes through them, and so what you pay per euro taken, by making your restaurant visible without an intermediary on Google and in answer engines.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5.0/5 from 20 reviews (Google, Sortlist, Malt, Pages Jaunes)
Since 2019Independent agency, trained in restaurant management at the Institut Paul BocusePublic pricingShown on this page, from €390 excl. VAT per month, no minimum termMonthly measurementLocal rankings, share of covers booked direct, citations in AI answers -
The situation
What platforms take from your covers
You see it on every statement: part of what your customers pay does not come back to you. Each to their own trade. Ours is restaurant SEO: making your establishment visible without an intermediary; what happens on the plate falls under culinary marketing. First, here is what the public figures say about the cost of platforms in the restaurant trade.
- As much as 30 to 35% of a delivery order. That is the range cited in the French National Assembly for the commissions that delivery platforms charge independent restaurateurs.Source: written question no. 12960, Journal officiel of the National Assembly, 17/02/2026.
- An estimated 24 to 25% per order, excluding paid promotion. This is the commission that a restaurateur listed on the two main delivery platforms estimates paying on each order, before any sponsorship option.Source: L'Hôtellerie Restauration, 18/02/2026, operator testimony.
- Per-cover fees with no public price list for bookings. TheFork does not publish a full price list: the subscription and per-cover fees are priced on a sales quote. You therefore cannot compare without asking.Observed on 14/08/2026, on the publisher's public pages.
- No benchmark French study on the impact on margin. To our knowledge, as of 14/08/2026, no French trade organisation publishes a benchmark figure for the weight of these commissions in margin points. Each restaurant has to make its own calculation, and that is exactly what we do at the scoping stage.
The answer is not to leave the platforms. It is to pay less in commissions by raising the share of covers booked and ordered direct.
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The method
Local SEO for restaurants, in six parts
Restaurant SEO is first of all local SEO: much of the searching is done on mobile, near where people want to eat, and Google answers with three placements: the local pack with the map, the full list of establishments, and the organic results. Our SEO agency works on all three, including spellings typed without accents, such as referencement restaurant or reservations en ligne, because that is how your customers type them. Each part below says what is done and what it changes for growing your direct bookings.
ARETA, a restaurant marketing and organic SEO agency based in the Basque Country, increases independent restaurants' share of direct bookings, with public pricing displayed from €390 excl. VAT per month.01 · Foundation
Site technology and speed
A fast site, easy to read on mobile, with a menu in real text rather than an image or scanned PDF, and structured restaurant data that machines can read. Without this foundation, the rest carries less weight.
02 · Profile
Business profile and reference directories
Right primary category, menu, photos, up-to-date opening hours, attributes, and a consistent address everywhere: Google Business Profile, website, directories and guides. This is what decides your presence in the local pack and in the list of establishments. We will cover this part in detail in a restaurant's Google Business Profile.
03 · Content
Local pages and content
The searches that fill a dining room are specific: a speciality, a neighbourhood, a group menu, a brunch, a room that can be hired for private events, gluten-free cooking. We start from your menu and your real customers, not from a generic list of keywords.
04 · Reviews
Reviews and trust signals
The volume and freshness of customer reviews weigh on local ranking, and the rating weighs heavily on the decision to click. What matters is consistency: asking for reviews, replying to all of them, passing what keeps coming up back to the kitchen. We equip this process as part of managing your online reputation.
05 · Direct channel
Direct booking and ordering
Visibility is only worth something if it ends up with you: booking from your website and your Google Business Profile, direct ordering and takeaway sales, with no per-cover commission. This is the part that turns rankings into revenue that does not go through an intermediary.
06 · Measurement
Monthly measurement
Local rankings, calls and directions from your Google Business Profile, covers booked direct, and the platform dependency index: the share of your revenue that goes through an intermediary. It is what tells you whether the work pays off.
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Answer engines
AI visibility: being cited when people ask where to dine
A growing share of your future customers no longer types a search: they ask a question, of ChatGPT, of Gemini, or of Google, which now replies with a written paragraph. These answers cite only a few addresses. The work needed to appear in them is not the work done on the Google Business Profile, and it is precisely restaurant SEO extended to answer engines. Three dated facts frame the subject.
22 July 2026
Google rolled out AI Overviews and AI Mode in France. On some restaurant searches, the answer is a text that cites a few establishments, above the usual ten links.
Source: Google announcement, July 2026.
How it works
ChatGPT does not have access to Google Business Profile data. When it searches the web, it relies on the Bing index, on third-party directories and on the establishments' own websites. A perfect Google Business Profile is therefore not enough to be cited.
Source: OpenAI documentation and ARETA tracking observations, 2026.
23 July 2026
OpenAI and Yelp announced a partnership. Third-party directories, guides and listings weigh more and more in what assistants answer about restaurants. Consistency of your information everywhere is becoming an asset.
Source: OpenAI announcement, July 2026.
What we do, and what we measure. Consistent information across your website, your profile and the sector's reference directories, pages that answer real questions, markup that machines can read. Then regular checks of your citations on ChatGPT and Gemini, the two engines our protocol measures today. Local example: Gemini visibility in Bayonne, which we track for establishments in the Basque Country.
We will shortly publish a page dedicated to AI visibility for a hotel or a restaurant, and an article on visibility in AI answers applied to the concrete case of a traveller looking for a table.
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Choosing the right provider
Restaurant marketing agency: who should you trust with your direct bookings?
Under the words restaurant marketing agency or food service marketing agency sit trades that have almost nothing in common. Restaurant marketing agencies, restaurant marketing firms, customer acquisition solutions through direct channels, digital marketing providers for restaurants: before comparing quotes, compare families of providers. Here are four, and what to ask them.
01
Booking and ordering software providers
They supply the tool: booking module, online ordering, POS system. Essential, but a tool does not bring in customers: it processes those that your visibility produces.
02
Social media and advertising agencies
Useful for awareness and image, less so for active search: a hungry customer searches, they do not scroll. Social builds the brand, SEO captures demand.
03
General restaurant digital marketing agencies
A restaurant digital marketing agency focused on direct bookings should be able to show you how it measures the direct share. If the report stops at impressions and clicks, the question of commissions will remain unanswered.
04
Specialist SEO and AI visibility
Our family: restaurant SEO, visibility in answer engines, and reporting in share of covers booked directly. You may also find us under restaurant SEO agency: it is the same trade, with AI added.
What we do not do. We do not manage your delivery, we do not publish a booking engine or a POS system, we do not negotiate your platform contracts, and we do not guarantee any ranking or citation. The English-language press talks about marketing services for restaurants direct bookings: their effectiveness is judged by a single figure, the share of your covers that pays no commission. That is the one we measure.
Who we work with. Independent restaurants, fine-dining venues, bistros and hotel restaurants, in the Basque Country, Béarn and across France, as a marketing consultant in the Basque Country and remotely. Of the nine agencies most cited by the AI tools we audited in August 2026, none dealt with restaurant disintermediation: that is our hotel and restaurant specialism. For the selection criteria, we will publish a full guide: how to choose a hotel and restaurant marketing agency.
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The calculation
What an order costs, by channel
Here is the same €100 order paid twice: once through a delivery platform, once directly, on your website or at your counter. This is a worked example, built with public, documented rates, not a market average or a client result. Redo it with the rates in your own contract: the method matters more than the figure.
Step Through a delivery platform Direct Order paid by the customer 100,00 € 100,00 € Platform commission, 30% of the order −30,00 € 0,00 € Cost of your direct tools (website, subscription-based ordering or booking module) 0,00 € A fixed monthly cost, independent of volume, spread across all your orders in the month What you keep, before production costs 70,00 € €100.00 minus your spread fixed costs ARETA worked example, set on 14/08/2026. Rate used: 30% of the order, the low end of the 30 to 35% range cited for delivery platforms at the French National Assembly (written question No. 12960, Official Journal of 17/02/2026); a restaurateur quoted by L'Hôtellerie Restauration (18/02/2026) puts their commission at between 24 and 25% per order, excluding paid promotion options. Delivery fees charged to the customer and production costs are not included in the example.
Direct has a cost too, but it is fixed. Subscription-based booking solutions exist with no per-cover commission: Zenchef, for example, lists plans from €129 to €249 per month, zero commission per cover (pricing page viewed on 11/08/2026); the vendor is both judge and party, and card payment fees of 2 to 6% depending on the plan are added. The logic holds whichever tool you use: a fixed cost is diluted as the volume of direct orders rises, a commission never is.
We will cover this topic in two upcoming pieces: the weight of platforms in your margin, and the platform cost per cover, line by line.
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Direct booking
What direct changes, beyond the commission
Raising the share of covers booked and ordered directly does not only affect the commissions line. Here is what direct concretely changes in a dining room.
Your margin per order
A direct order carries no proportional commission. What you save on each cover goes back into your margin, with no change to your menu or your prices.
Your customer data
A direct booking tells you who is coming, when, and who comes back. It is the raw material of loyalty. A restaurant POS system linked to your Google Business Profile closes the loop between visibility and revenue, and the POS buying guide compares the selection criteria.
The relationship, with no intermediary
Confirmation, reminder, thank-you message, invitation to come back: with direct, this dialogue belongs to you. Through a platform, it belongs to the platform, which uses it to promote neighbouring tables as well.
Your independence
A fee scale that changes, a paid promotion that becomes indispensable, an algorithm that reorders: by depending less on platforms, these decisions taken without you weigh less on your occupancy.
A word of honesty about the figures. To our knowledge, no reliable public data currently measures cancellations or no-shows by channel for French restaurants: we will therefore not quote a figure here, and we are wary of those who do. Do you also run accommodation? The same work exists on the rooms side: more direct bookings for your hotel.
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The proof
How we measure, before claiming anything
You will not find a client figure on this page, nor a percentage of improvement taken from an unverifiable anonymous case. We will publish results when they are measured, named and authorised by the businesses concerned. In the meantime, here is the protocol, as we apply it to every restaurant SEO assignment.
01
The starting point
Before any action: local rankings, state of the profile, customer review flow, covers booked directly, and the share of your revenue that goes through platforms, delivery and booking combined. Without this initial baseline, any later review cannot be verified.
02
The platform dependency index
A single summary indicator: the share of your revenue collected through an intermediary. It is a ratio, not an amount. If your volume rises, your commission bill may stay stable while the intermediated share falls: that is the result we are looking for.
03
The monthly report
Rankings, calls and directions requests from the profile, direct bookings and orders, citations in AI answers, dependency index. The report also says what did not work, and what we take from it for the following month.
Measured cases are coming. We are preparing to publish hotel and restaurant client cases in the most verifiable format there is: the measured starting point, what was done, the period, the measured result. Three figures and a sentence are worth more than a story with no starting point.
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Frequently asked questions
What restaurateurs ask
The questions that come up most often before starting work on visibility, with the answers we really give.
How much does restaurant SEO cost?
Our pricing is public. The Local SEO Starter Pack starts at €390 excl. VAT per month and covers the local foundation: business profile, photos, customer reviews, consistency of directories and guides. The Google 1st Page Pack starts at €990 excl. VAT per month and covers the six parts of the method, including visibility in AI answers. The full SEO audit is billed from €1,500 excl. VAT, as a fixed fee.
Fixed-fee assignments, redesign, content or link building, are quoted at a firm price after the audit. None of these amounts requires a minimum term. The first 30-minute conversation is free, at the restaurant or by video call.
How long before you see results?
It depends on the lever. A poorly completed Google Business Profile that is properly reworked can move within a few weeks, sometimes less, because you are fixing an obvious gap. Website SEO, on the other hand, is counted in months: pages have to be produced and indexed, then you have to wait for Google to evaluate them.
So we set two horizons at the scoping stage. The short term, on the profile and customer reviews, where we look for quick, measurable gains. And the long term, on the website and content, which builds a visibility that no longer depends on a platform. Being promised first place within a month is a warning sign, not a selling point.
Do you have to pay TheFork and the platforms to be visible?
They bring you covers, especially at launch and in quiet periods. The problem is not that they exist, it is depending on them entirely: you pay a commission on customers many of whom would have found you on their own.
The right question is not whether to leave them but what they really bring you. A customer who saw you on Instagram, searched for your name, then booked through the platform costs you a commission for nothing. This can be measured, and it is what justifies investing in direct booking.
What does SEO actually change about my commissions?
It does not change your rates, which depend on your contracts with the platforms. It changes the share of your revenue that goes through them. It is this ratio that decides what you pay per euro collected.
A common scenario is worth setting out in advance: if your visibility improves, direct bookings rise, and the platforms may keep the same volume. Your commission bill then does not fall in euros, even though the intermediated share of your revenue has fallen. That is the expected result, and it is why we measure a ratio and not an amount.
What is local SEO for a restaurant?
It is the work that makes your restaurant visible in searches made near you, very often on mobile. Google answers with three placements: the local pack with the map, the full list of businesses, and the organic results. Restaurant local SEO means appearing in all three, including queries typed without accents, because restaurant SEO also depends on what customers really type.
The queries that convert are rarely the most obvious ones: your speciality, your neighbourhood, an occasion, a dietary requirement, a time of day. We start from your menu and your real clientele, not from a generic list. This is the underlying logic of our organic SEO work, applied to restaurants.
Can my restaurant be recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini?
Yes, and more and more customers put the question to an assistant rather than a search engine, particularly visitors planning a stay.
These systems cite only a few addresses. Appearing among them requires consistent information across your website, your Google Business Profile and industry sources, pages that answer real questions, and markup that machines can read. We measure this visibility in AI answers through regular checks, on ChatGPT and Gemini.
What exactly does a restaurant marketing agency do?
The term covers very different trades: vendors of booking and ordering tools, social media agencies, general restaurant digital marketing agencies, and specialist SEO and AI visibility agencies, of which we are one. None of these families does the work of the others.
ARETA works on restaurant SEO in search engines and on visibility in answer engines, and reports in share of covers booked and ordered directly. We do not manage your delivery, we do not publish a booking tool, and we do not guarantee any ranking or citation.
How are results measured?
On indicators you can tie to your business, not on isolated rankings. We track the calls and directions requested from your Google Business Profile, bookings and orders made directly, the queries on which you appear, the customer review flow, and the platform dependency index: the share of your revenue that goes through an intermediary.
The point of comparison is your own starting situation, recorded at the scoping stage. Without this initial baseline, any later review cannot be verified.
A question that is not on the list?
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Free meeting · 30 min · no obligation
Let us talk about your direct covers
Thirty minutes, at the restaurant or by video call: where your visibility stands, what the platforms really take from you, and where to start. No billed audit and no commitment. Main office in Bayonne, assignments in the Basque Country and Béarn, notably in Pau and the Pau area, and remotely anywhere in France.
Email[email protected]Phone06 50 82 74 13Address2 place du Château Vieux
64100 BayonneLinkedInARETAMonday to Friday, 8am to 8pm
Last updated: 26 October 2026
A restaurant SEO agency to fill the dining room
Restaurant SEO agency: the scope
The work covers the business listing, the menu as real text, local pages and reviews. ARETA adds a monthly measurement: local rankings, calls, directions requests and covers booked directly. The report also says what did not work and what we take from it for the following month.
Questions to ask before choosing
Before entrusting your visibility to a restaurant SEO agency, ask how it measures the share of direct bookings, what it does not do and which tools it works with. We manage neither your delivery, nor your booking engine, nor your platform contracts, and we guarantee neither a position nor a citation.
Local search and answer engines
The same pages serve local search and assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini, whose citations we record every month. Spellings typed without accents are part of the work, because your customers write them that way. A page that answers a real question is read by both.
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