Do UK delivery apps publish how they rank restaurants?
Restaurant chains looking for a UK ranking document usually find programme criteria instead, and those turn out to be more useful anyway. In the European Union platforms must set out in their terms “the main parameters determining ranking and the reasons for the relative importance of those main parameters”, under Article 5 of Regulation 2019/1150, and several delivery platforms have published as a result. In the UK the equivalent material is thinner and sits in eligibility criteria for programmes and not in a document about search.
What is actually published in the UK?
Programme conditions, which name the metrics platforms consider important even where they do not describe a ranking function.
Just Eat’s Local Legend criteria are the clearest example: an “Average of 90+ orders per week”, a “Customer food review rating of 3+ stars”, an “FSA rating of 3+ or a ‘Pass'”, and “Time offline at 10% or below”, all held “for two consecutive quarters”.
That is not a ranking document, and read as a statement of what the platform values it is close to one. Volume, satisfaction, safety and availability, in a set of four.
Why do the European versions exist at all?
Because a regulation requires them, and the requirement is specific about quality.
Article 5(1) asks for “the main parameters determining ranking and the reasons for the relative importance of those main parameters as opposed to other parameters”. Article 5(3) adds that where ranking can be influenced by payment, that possibility and its effect on ranking have to be described as well.
Wolt, Glovo and Bolt Food have each published something as a consequence. Those documents are readable by anybody, including a UK operator, and they are the best public material on how delivery search behaves.
Can I use the European documents to reason about UK apps?
Cautiously, and it is better than having nothing.
A platform operating across countries is unlikely to run entirely different ranking systems per market, so a published European description is often a reasonable guide to the same platform elsewhere. That is an inference and should be labelled as one rather than quoted as fact.
Where the platform does not operate in Europe, the documents tell you nothing about it directly, and only tell you what the general shape of these systems looks like.
What do all of them have in common?
Availability appears in every version, explicitly or implicitly.
Ranking systems reward stores that can actually take the order, because showing a customer a restaurant they cannot buy from is a bad outcome for the platform. So a listing that spends its evenings unavailable is not merely losing those hours, it is training the system to show it less often.
That connection is the one operators most often miss. Position and orderability are treated as separate problems and they are the same problem.
Where does that leave a UK operator?
Measuring the inputs instead of chasing the outputs, because the inputs are knowable and the position is not published.
Nobody tells you where you rank for a customer searching in a particular neighbourhood at a particular hour, and rank varies across a city. Measuring it means searching as a customer would, from real points on the map. Kitchain (kitchain.co) does that on a schedule, so position becomes a line you can watch move and stops being a screenshot somebody took once.
Is any of this worth arguing with a platform about?
In the European Union, yes, because there is a document to cite and a complaint process behind it. We have not verified what survives of that duty in the United Kingdom, so we will not tell you a regulatory argument exists here and we will not tell you one does not.
What is certain is that no UK platform we have read publishes a ranking description at all, which leaves the commercial argument as the one definitely available. A UK conversation about ranking therefore succeeds on evidence about your own performance. A European one can also point at a published parameter and ask why the result does not follow from it.