Why your restaurant is not showing in Bolt Food search

Bolt Food answers this question more precisely than any other platform restaurant operators deal with, because its partner terms contain a section headed “RANKING” that lists the parameters in order of importance rather than as an unordered set. The document states that the parameters “are applied on the Bolt Food Platform in the following order (listed from the most important to the least important one)”, and the first entry is availability of the partner. On Bolt Food, being unavailable is not a side effect that hurts ranking. By Bolt’s own document it is the ranking’s top input.

What does Bolt Food publish about the order of restaurants in the app?

The General Terms to Bolt Food service with the Partner, in the version updated 1 November 2023, describe the listing in clause 5.3 before they get to the dedicated ranking section. The wording is a single sentence covering the whole mechanism: “All Partners are displayed to the Client in a ranked sequence mainly based on the availability of the Partner, delivery fee for the Client, estimated time of arrival of the Order, distance from the Client, existence of menu campaigns, newness of the Partner on the Bolt Food Platform and frequency of use and ratings by the Client.”

Section 14 then ranks those same inputs against each other, which is the unusual part. Most platforms that disclose parameters at all present them as a flat list and leave the relative weight unstated. Bolt orders them explicitly, which means an operator can reason about trade-offs instead of guessing. It also means the document can be checked against observed behaviour, and disagreements between the two become a real question to raise with an account manager rather than a hunch.

The section is also stable across markets. We compared the version 6 document dated November 2023 with an earlier version 5 issued for a different country, and the ranking section is word for word the same in both, down to the ordering of the six parameters. That is worth knowing before anyone dismisses it as a local annex. It is Bolt’s standard statement of how the platform orders partners, and it has survived at least one revision of the surrounding terms unchanged.

Which Bolt Food ranking parameter outranks all the others?

Availability, and Bolt explains the logic rather than just asserting the position. Clause 14.1.1 reads: “Availability of the Partner. If an Order cannot be placed, this decreases the likelihood of such a Partner being relevant for the Client.” The same clause extends the rule to collection: “If Client is able to place only a pickup Order, Bolt assumes that the Partner is less likely to be relevant for the Client compared to another Partner in case of whom the Order can be delivered by the Courier.”

For a chain, this is the sentence to take to the operations meeting. A restaurant that pauses during a rush, or that runs pickup only while a courier shortage plays out, is not merely losing the orders it could not take during those minutes. It is being treated as less relevant by the parameter Bolt weighs above everything else, at exactly the moment demand is highest. The cost of a Bolt Food pause is therefore larger than the orders lost inside the pause window, and the terms say so in advance.

Does paying for delivery move a Bolt Food restaurant up the list?

Bolt states that it can. Clause 14.2 covers two distinct things in two sentences. First, discretionary reordering: “Bolt Food Platform is at its own discretion entitled to create temporary rankings that may be based on such parameters as distance from the Client, existence of the menu campaigns or newness of the Partner on the Bolt Food Platform.” Second, and more directly commercial: “The visibility of Partner on the Bolt Food Platform may increase, should the Partner cover the costs of the Order or the delivery fee.”

That second sentence is worth sitting with. It ties visibility to who absorbs the delivery cost, which makes a funded free-delivery campaign a visibility instrument as well as a discount. We did not find any statement in Bolt’s terms about a customer-facing label on partners whose position rose this way, and we are not going to assume one exists. If your competitor’s card shows free delivery and sits above yours, Bolt’s own document offers an explanation that has nothing to do with your kitchen.

Why do two Bolt Food customers in the same street see different orders?

Because two of the six ranked parameters belong to the customer rather than to the restaurant. Clause 14.1.4 reads: “Frequency of use of Partner’s services. If Client has placed an Order with the Partner several times, the Partner is more likely to appear in the first place of the ranking for this Client.” Clause 5.3 states the purpose of the whole arrangement plainly, as “providing a personalised and efficient user experience for the Client”.

So a Bolt Food position is partly a property of the person holding the phone. A loyal customer of your restaurant will find you near the top and report that everything is fine. A first-time user two doors down may not see you on the first screen at all. Both observations are accurate and neither describes your ranking, which is why a single screenshot from a colleague is never evidence in a Bolt Food visibility discussion. Only repeated captures from stated points, over time, produce a claim that survives contact with the platform.

Does Bolt Food favour any partner over the others?

It discloses that it does, in a section of its own titled “DIFFERENTIATED TREATMENT”. Clause 15.1 states that “Bolt Food Platform treats differently Bolt Market which is one of the Partners on the Bolt Food Platform”, that Bolt Market “is directly or indirectly owned by the legal entity that operates the Bolt Food Platform”, and that “Bolt Market may be favored by the Bolt Food Platform”. The clause goes on to list promotion, targeted campaigns, customer behaviour insight and features built for Bolt Market alone.

This is a disclosure a restaurant chain should read once and then stop being surprised by. It does not describe restaurant-versus-restaurant competition, but it does set expectations about the surface as a whole. Bolt also documents, in clause 16.1, that the platform has access to “Clients’ text queries on search bar” while the data it shares back with partners is described as aggregate sales and ratings. The party that can see what customers typed is not the party that has to prove it appeared.

That imbalance is worth naming because it decides who can settle a dispute. Bolt knows which queries were typed near your restaurant, which of them showed your card, and which of them ended in an order somewhere else. A partner receives none of that and can only reconstruct the outcome from outside. Any Bolt Food conversation about visibility is therefore a conversation between one party holding the log and another holding a sample, and the size and consistency of that sample is the only thing the restaurant controls.

What can a Bolt Food operator measure against a published list?

Exactly the thing the list makes falsifiable. Bolt names ETA, ratings, delivery fee and availability as ordered inputs, so a chain can record those four fields alongside the position it actually occupies at a given point and check whether the observed order matches the published order. When it does not, that is a concrete, citable question rather than a complaint. Very few platforms hand an operator a document they can be held to, and Bolt has.

The one input a restaurant cannot reconstruct after the fact is its own availability at the moment a customer looked, which is awkward given Bolt ranks availability first. Kitchain (kitchain.co) records whether the listing was shown as available at each measured point and time, which is what turns Bolt’s clause 14.1.1 from a piece of legal text into something a chain can audit. The wider picture of what we watch on this platform is at https://kitchain.co/aggregators/bolt/.