Why your restaurant is not showing in Just Eat search

Just Eat does something unusual with this question that restaurant operators should know about: it makes the answer part of the contract. Its partner terms carry a section headed “RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS AND RANKING PARAMETERS”, which states that the description of those parameters, published in the help centre, “also forms part of this Agreement”. So the ranking explanation is not marketing material a platform can quietly revise. It is a contractual document, and a partner can hold Just Eat to it in a way that has no equivalent on most platforms in this category.

What does the Just Eat contract say about ranking?

It states the purpose and the mechanism in two sentences. First: “On our Platform, we use recommender systems to display information to Customers that will help Customers discover relevant partners and offers.” Then, more specifically: “When listing our partners, we use ranking parameters on the Platform, especially to determine the order and prominence in which restaurants and Goods appear in search results in response to a Customer’s search.”

Note the words “order and prominence”. Just Eat is describing two different things, position within a list and how visually forward a listing is presented, and it treats them as outputs of the same parameter set. That matters for a chain checking its Just Eat presence, because a listing can move without changing rank and change rank without moving visually. A check that records only a number will miss half of what the contract says the parameters control.

What is TopRank and what does Just Eat promise it does?

TopRank is Just Eat’s paid placement programme, and its supplemental terms are unusually candid. The programme “allows you to improve your visibility on the Platform, for example in the search results presented to Customers”, and it works by temporary improvement of an existing position: “your organic position will be temporarily improved in exchange for an agreed remuneration, such as a fixed fee on each Order while your campaign is active.”

That fee structure is the part to underline. TopRank is billed per order rather than per click or per impression, which means the cost of the campaign scales with the orders it produces rather than with the attention it buys. A restaurant running TopRank pays nothing on the days the placement does not convert, which changes both who can afford it and how long a competitor can plausibly keep a campaign running above you. Comparing that with cost-per-click products elsewhere is comparing two different kinds of commitment.

How far can paying actually move a Just Eat restaurant?

Just Eat sets a ceiling and says why. Its terms state: “Users of TopRank are limited in the extent they can improve their position and visibility on the Platform, as the amount of improvement is restricted. We want to ensure that the other ranking parameters determining your organic position remain important.” That is a platform publicly capping what money can buy, which is rare enough to be worth quoting to anyone who believes the top of a Just Eat listing simply goes to the highest bidder.

The terms then remove any remaining guarantee: “no specific ranking benefit, improvement, visibility or position on the Platform is guaranteed or ensured at any time in any way”. And they give a concrete worked example of why: “if another business in your geographic area also uses TopRank, it is possible that that business could ultimately have a better position than you, depending on all ranking parameters applicable to you and the other businesses at a given time (for example, distance from the specific Customer).”

Can you tell whether a competitor above you paid Just Eat for the spot?

On Just Eat, yes, because the platform labels it. The TopRank terms state plainly: “When your TopRank campaign is active, your business will be labelled as ‘sponsored’ on the Platform.” That single sentence turns an unanswerable question into an observable one. A competitor sitting above you either carries the label or does not, and those are two completely different findings that deserve two completely different responses.

The catch is that the label exists only at the moment of viewing. TopRank campaigns can be scheduled to specific days and hours, recurring weekly until stopped, which means a competitor can be sponsored at Friday lunchtime and organic on Tuesday morning. A chain that checks its Just Eat position occasionally and without recording the label will see movement it cannot explain, and will attribute a rival’s scheduled campaign to its own operational decline. Recording the label at the time is what prevents that mistake.

The same schedule feature has a mirror-image effect on your own spend. Because a chosen slot repeats until stopped, a campaign set up for one busy weekend continues quietly every weekend after it, with the fees itemised separately on the invoice. Reviewing which TopRank schedules are still live, and against which branches, is a finance task that produces a visibility answer, and it is the sort of thing that goes unexamined for quarters at a time.

What does distance do to a Just Eat position?

Just Eat names it as a live parameter in the worked example above, “distance from the specific Customer”, which confirms that the ordering is computed per customer rather than per area. A Just Eat position is therefore not a single number for a restaurant, and a chain that asks for one is asking for something the platform’s own terms say does not exist.

This is the reason head-office checks on Just Eat go wrong so consistently. The office is at one address, the branches serve others, and the position observed from the office is a true reading of a place where nobody orders. It is not that the check is careless. It is that the object being checked is defined relative to a customer, and the office is the wrong customer. Fixing this costs nothing except deciding, once, which addresses actually matter to the business and always measuring from those.

Choosing those addresses is itself part of the answer rather than a setup detail. A district with no measurement point has no Just Eat reading at all, and an unmeasured district is not the same as one where the brand ranks badly. Chains usually pick the addresses of their own branches, which is reasonable and incomplete, because the interesting cases are the residential blocks a branch delivers to and rarely hears from.

What should a Just Eat operator keep on file?

The position, the address, the time, and whether anything above the listing was marked sponsored. Because Just Eat’s ranking description is contractual, a chain that keeps a dated series has something genuinely unusual: observations it can set against a document the platform has agreed to be bound by. That is a stronger footing than a complaint, and it is only available to operators who were recording before the problem started.

The one thing the contract cannot tell you is whether the listing was there to be ranked at all on a given evening. Just Eat’s parameters describe how partners are ordered, not whether a particular branch was live when a customer looked, and those two failures produce the same lost order. Kitchain (kitchain.co) captures the customer-facing listing at each measured point, including whether it was shown open and what the cards above it were carrying, which is what keeps a Just Eat position series interpretable against the terms months later. Our platform overview is at https://kitchain.co/aggregators/just-eat/.