Why your Deliveroo rating dropped and what actually changes it
Deliveroo publishes more of its rating arithmetic than any other platform restaurant operators deal with, and the published number that matters is 400. Deliveroo states that “The rating shown on the restaurant list is an average of the last 400 ratings you have received.” That is a rolling count, not a rolling date, so a busy site refreshes its whole rating in weeks and a quiet site carries a bad month for the best part of a year. The same rating then feeds a hard 3.8 star threshold that decides whether a site keeps access to Deliveroo’s promotional tools.
A 400 order window makes downtime a rating event rather than only a revenue one. The average Deliveroo interruption is a daypart rather than a blip (3 hours 10 minutes on our July 2026 UAE panel), and a daypart that produces no orders produces no ratings. Nothing enters the window to push the bad scores out of it, so a site that was offline for three hours on Friday carries last month’s complaints for longer than a site that traded through. The penalty is not the lost lunch. It is that the lost lunch cannot be used to recover.
How does Deliveroo calculate a restaurant rating?
By averaging a fixed count of the most recent scores rather than a time period. Deliveroo’s help centre states it in one line: “The rating shown on the restaurant list is an average of the last 400 ratings you have received.” The input is simple, because “At the end of an order we ask customers to rate their experience. A customer can rate an order from 1 to 5 stars.”
There is also a floor before anything is displayed at all. Deliveroo says “We will only start to show ratings for your restaurant once you have completed 10 orders which have been rated.” A new site therefore shows no star at all until ten rated orders exist, and the eleventh rating carries roughly a tenth of the visible score. That is why new openings swing violently for a fortnight and then settle. Source: help.deliveroo.com.
Why does a Deliveroo rating drop cost a site its offers and adverts?
Because one of the conditions Deliveroo attaches to its promotional tool is a number on the star, and Deliveroo publishes that number: “Star rating must be 3.8 or more”. A site under 3.8 at the moment of assessment loses Adverts and Offers for the following calendar month. The other conditions are operational rather than reputational, and the full set, the assessment date and the market variations are laid out on our page on Deliveroo promotions that do not show. Source: help.deliveroo.com.
Read 3.8 against the 400 rating window and the gate stops looking like a cliff edge and starts looking like a slope. A site at 4.1 does not fall to 3.7 in a week. The fall happens by replacing good ratings with mediocre ones a few at a time over a month or two. The crossing is therefore visible in advance to anyone recording the star daily, and invisible to everyone else. The window also sets how long the penalty runs, because the same slow arithmetic has to carry the site back over 3.8 before the next assessment.
Does a Deliveroo rating change where your restaurant appears in the app?
Yes, and Deliveroo says so twice in different words. The ratings article states that “Your restaurant rating can impact your position on the restaurant list”, and adds that “Restaurants with good order ratings appear higher up on the restaurant list.” The visibility article repeats it more cautiously: “Ratings can have an impact on your position in the app.”
Rating is not the only lever there. Deliveroo also names Estimated Order Duration, saying “A shorter EOD gives you a better chance of appearing higher up in the restaurant list”, alongside paid adverts, menu photography and traffic from your own channels. The point for an operator is that a rating drop is rarely a single cost. It lowers the placement that generates the volume that would refresh the 400 order window, which is the mechanism that makes a Deliveroo slide feel self reinforcing.
Can a Deliveroo review be removed or challenged?
Only through a report, and only on content grounds. Deliveroo does not offer a merchant dispute over the score itself. What it offers is a reporting route: “If you see a review that you think breaks our rules, you can submit a report to us through the Deliveroo app by clicking on the three dots next to the review”, followed by “We reserve the right to remove any content that violates these guidelines.” The published grounds are things like spam, threats, personal information, advertising and off topic content, not disagreement with the star count.
One category does come out of the average automatically. Deliveroo states that “Where incentivised reviews are removed, they will no longer be included in your overall rating”, which means a restaurant that solicits reviews with an incentive can have those ratings stripped after the fact. Partners can also reply: Deliveroo directs you to the ratings and reviews section on Hub “to reply to your customer reviews and help resolve a question or issue.” Source: help.deliveroo.com.
Where does a Deliveroo operator actually see the rating?
In Partner Hub, and the useful part is the comparison rather than the number. Deliveroo’s help centre says restaurant ratings live in the Partner Hub, where a partner can respond to customer ratings, benchmark ratings against competitors in the same area, follow preparation time trends over 7 or 30 day periods and compare performance across multiple locations. Source: help.deliveroo.com.
What Hub does not do is tell a chain when a specific site crossed 3.8 in the days before the monthly assessment. The assessment happens three days before the first of the month, silently, and the first visible symptom is usually that a campaign a chain thought was live is not running at one branch. Because that check lands on a fixed calendar date and the star rating that decides it is a public number on the customer facing page, Kitchain (kitchain.co) records each Deliveroo site’s rating daily and flags sites drifting toward 3.8 while there is still a month to move them.
What actually moves a Deliveroo rating back up?
Volume of good orders, faster than the bad ones age out. Because the window is 400 ratings rather than 90 days, the recovery speed of a Deliveroo site is a function of its own order count, and two branches with the same rating and different volumes will recover at different speeds. A high volume site that fixes its packaging in March is clean by April. A low volume site with the same fix carries the same average into the summer.
Deliveroo’s own advice on causes is short and matches its metrics: keep ratings high by delivering on time, using quality packaging and avoiding missed or incorrect items. Those three map directly onto the criteria that decide Marketer access, since late preparation is measured against a five minute tolerance and rejections are capped at 8 percent. Fixing lateness therefore does two jobs at once, and it is the only one of the three with a published numeric definition to aim at.
Deliveroo’s site states, its markets and how a listing goes offline in the first place are covered separately at kitchain.co/aggregators/deliveroo/.