Which European delivery apps publish their ranking factors
Restaurant chains looking for this material usually cannot find it, because none of it is filed under ranking and none of it is advertised. Wolt keeps a page on how its search and recommender systems work. Glovo publishes a set of factors. Bolt Food buries its description inside the partner terms instead of publishing help content. Foody publishes its complaint handling under the same regulation. Four platforms, four different places, and the reason any of them exist is Article 5(1) of Regulation 2019/1150.
Where do I actually find them?
In three different kinds of place, which is why nobody has the full set.
Wolt’s is help content, so it is findable by search and reads like an explanation. Glovo’s is a published list of factors. Bolt Food’s is inside the partner terms, which means it is in the document you signed and never opened rather than in anything a search engine will hand you. Foody’s complaint material sits in its General Terms for Business Users.
The lesson for anybody assembling this is to read the terms of every platform you are on before searching the web for its help pages. The terms are where the least advertised material is.
What do the documents typically contain?
Factors, not formulas, which is what the article asks for.
Expect to see distance or delivery time, customer rating, order volume or popularity, whether the store is currently able to take orders, and some notion of relevance to what the customer searched. Where paid placement exists, Article 5(3) requires that to be described along with its effect.
What you will not see is weights, thresholds or anything you could compute. Article 5(1) asks for the main parameters and the reasons for their relative importance, which is a description and not a specification.
Which factor matters most for an operator?
Availability, because it is the one you control directly and the one most often overlooked.
Ranking systems favour restaurants that can take the order, since showing a customer a listing they cannot buy from is a poor outcome for the platform. So a site that spends its evenings unavailable is losing those hours and simultaneously teaching the system to show it less often.
Operators treat position and orderability as separate problems. The documents suggest they are the same problem.
Can I use these documents outside the market they were written for?
As a guide rather than as a fact, and label the difference.
A platform operating across many countries is unlikely to run entirely different ranking systems per market, so a European description is often a fair account of the same platform elsewhere. That is an inference. Quoting it as a statement about another market is the kind of small overreach that undermines an otherwise good argument.
What is still missing after reading them?
Your position, which nobody publishes.
The documents explain what is scored. They do not tell you where you rank for a customer standing in a particular neighbourhood at a particular hour, and rank varies across a city. Kitchain (kitchain.co) closes that half by searching the way a customer does, from real points in the catchment, so a group can hold its own position up against the parameters the platform published.
What is the practical use of a published document?
It changes the shape of a conversation with an account manager.
Asking why you are not visible invites a general answer. Asking why a named published parameter is not producing the expected result is specific, and it is the kind of question the internal complaint process under Article 11 is designed to accept.