My Italian restaurant is not showing in delivery search
Restaurant operators in Italy usually describe this as a ranking problem and about half the time it is an availability problem wearing a ranking costume. A listing that is not orderable does not appear, and a listing that is orderable but ranked low appears only to somebody who scrolls. Those look identical from a phone and need separating before anything else. What European operators do have, unlike most of the world, is a published description of the factors, because Article 5 of Regulation 2019/1150 requires it.
How do I tell invisible from low?
Search for the brand by name from an address near the site.
If it appears when you name it and not when you browse a category, it is live and ranked low. If it does not appear even by name, it is not orderable or not covering that address, and ranking has nothing to do with it.
That single test redirects most of these investigations, and it takes a minute.
What are the published factors?
Whatever your platform has set out under Article 5(1), which requires terms to state “the main parameters determining ranking and the reasons for the relative importance of those main parameters as opposed to other parameters”.
Where payment can influence position, Article 5(3) requires that possibility and its effect to be described too. And the article asks for more than a list. The reasons behind the relative importance of each parameter are part of what has to be published, which is a higher bar than most operators expect.
Read your own platform’s document and not a general account of how delivery search works. The differences between platforms are real.
What is almost always in them?
Availability, in some form, and this is the connection operators miss.
Ranking systems favour restaurants that can actually take the order, because showing a customer something they cannot buy is a bad outcome for the platform. A site that spends its evenings unavailable is not simply losing those hours, it is teaching the system to show it less often afterwards.
So position and orderability are one problem and not two, and improving position often starts with fixing something that has nothing to do with search.
Why can I not just look up my rank?
Because no platform publishes it, and because rank is not a single number.
Position depends on where the customer is standing, what they searched, and when. A restaurant can be second in one neighbourhood and absent three kilometres away, at the same moment, and no partner report shows this.
Measuring it means searching as a customer would, from real points across the catchment, repeatedly. Kitchain (kitchain.co) does that on a schedule, which turns position into a trend you can act on rather than a screenshot somebody took once.
What should an Italian operator do first?
Establish availability over the last month before touching anything about search.
If the listing has been unavailable during peak hours, that is both the immediate revenue problem and the most likely input to the ranking problem, and it is fixable without any negotiation.
Only once availability is clean is it worth reading the ranking document and asking why the result does not follow from it. That question, put to an account manager with the parameter named, is a different conversation from complaining about visibility.
What if the document does not explain the outcome?
That is a legitimate thing to raise, and Article 11 gives you a route: an internal complaint system that is “easily accessible and free of charge”, accepting complaints about the platform’s own measures and conduct.
Raise it as a mismatch between a published parameter and an observed result, with dates and locations. That is answerable. A complaint that you are not visible enough is not.