Why your restaurant is not showing in Deliveroo search

Deliveroo gives restaurant operators more written detail on this than any other platform in the Gulf, and it starts by naming the object. Its help centre defines the “restaurant/store list” as “how we present restaurants and stores to customers on Deliveroo. The higher up you are on this list, the more visible you are to customers.” It then states the constraint that overrides the rest: restaurants “will only appear on the Deliveroo if they are within the delivery radius of the post / area code the customer has entered”. Absence and low position are different findings with different fixes.

Why can a Deliveroo listing disappear without anything changing at the restaurant?

Because Deliveroo can shrink a site’s delivery radius when riders are short, and it says so in the help article written for partners whose stores are not appearing. Nothing about the account changed. The set of addresses that can see the site changed, and it can change back without notice. The mechanism and what a chain can do about it are on our page on Deliveroo delivery area problems.

The consequence for a visibility investigation is that position and presence have to be recorded together. A reading of “not in the list” at an address is two findings wearing one face: the site was ranked below where anyone scrolled, or the site was not eligible to appear at that address at all. Ranking work fixes the first and does nothing for the second. A series that logs only a position number, or only the absence of one, cannot tell them apart afterwards, and the distinction is not recoverable from any Deliveroo screen a week later.

Which factors does Deliveroo actually name as affecting app position?

Five, in a list Deliveroo publishes itself. Under the heading “What else affects the your position on the Deliveroo app?” the help centre answers: “Where you appear on the Deliveroo app is also influenced by: Customer ratings / Prep times / Delivery times / Rejected orders / Opening hours”. The typo in that heading is Deliveroo’s own. A companion article expands two of them, stating that “Ratings can have an impact on your position in the app”, and that on estimated order duration, “A shorter EOD gives you a better chance of appearing higher up in the restaurant list.”

Rejected orders being on that list is the item worth flagging inside a restaurant business, because rejections are usually treated as a service issue owned by the kitchen and not as a visibility issue owned by anybody. Deliveroo puts them in the same list as ratings. Opening hours are there too, and the platform is blunt about the consequence elsewhere: “Staying closed during your scheduled opening hours can lead to missed orders and may reduce the number of orders you receive after you reopen.”

Is the Deliveroo restaurant list the same for every customer?

No, and Deliveroo says so twice in different documents. The help centre states that “The Deliveroo app is personalised for each customer. Restaurants/stores will appear higher up the list for customers who are more likely to order from them.” Deliveroo’s published partner ranking policy goes further, describing the ordering on the homepage and via the search bar as “personalised by an automated algorithm”, so that “each user will see Partners ranked in an order which is personal to them according to their own preferences.”

That policy also states the governing principle in one sentence: “The main parameter which determines the order in which Partners are displayed on the Deliveroo platform is the likelihood that a customer will order from the Partners presented to them.” Among the inputs it names are the distance between the partner and the delivery address, whether the customer has ordered from that partner before, the time of day of those orders, the estimated order duration, and, unusually, “the use by the Partner of an image on the Platform.” One caveat matters: that policy page is published on Deliveroo’s European sites and returns a 404 on the UAE, Kuwait and UK domains.

What does Deliveroo charge for placement and how would you spot it?

Deliveroo runs a cost-per-click product it calls Marketer Adverts, described as “a cost-per-click ad service on Deliveroo that brings your brand in front of more customers by boosting its visibility on prime app spots”, with ads appearing “in high-visibility placements such as homepage carousels, cuisine pages, search results, and restaurant listings.” Bidding is explicit about the relationship between money and frequency: “The more you pay for your clicks, the more often your advert is likely to appear.”

Deliveroo publishes starting bid floors by market, including “AED = 1AED” and “KWD = 0.1KWD”, which makes this one of the few Gulf placement products with public pricing at all. It also names the labels a customer sees: “You can identify your advert by the ‘Sponsored’, ‘Ad’ or ‘Advert’ labels.” Separately, the ranking policy describes a paid carousel whose entries carry the note “Paid advertisement from our Partners”. So the layer above you is identifiable if somebody records it at the time, and invisible in hindsight if nobody does.

The carousels themselves are named, which helps a chain check the right thing. Deliveroo describes them as “featured sections in the Deliveroo app that help customers discover restaurants, like Offers Near You, Featured (sponsored placements), New On Deliveroo”, and its ranking policy lists others including “Order again”, “Best rating”, “Fastest delivery” and “Exclusively on Deliveroo”. Being absent from a plain search and being absent from the carousel your customers actually browse are different problems, and only one of them is fixed by ranking work.

Does a new Deliveroo restaurant get help, and for how long?

Yes, and Deliveroo puts an exact number on it, which almost nothing else in this category does. Its help centre states: “To help you get started, we boost new restaurants higher up on the restaurant list for the first 30 days you’re on the Deliveroo platform. After the first 30 days, you’re position on the restaurant list is affected by the same factors as other restaurants.” A published 30 day boundary is a gift to anyone opening sites, because it converts a vague expectation into a date.

The pattern it produces is predictable and still catches chains out. A new branch trades strongly for its first month, then settles, and somebody raises a ticket about a ranking problem in week six. Read against Deliveroo’s own text, week six is simply the first honest reading of that branch. The useful response is to have captured the position curve from day one, so the level after the boost ends is a known number rather than a shock, and so a real decline later can be told apart from the end of the boost.

What should a Deliveroo operator record, given all this is published?

The address, the time, the position, the state of the listing, and whether anything above it carried “Sponsored”, “Ad” or “Advert”. Deliveroo has named ratings, prep times, delivery times, rejected orders and opening hours as position factors, which means a chain can hold those five against its own observed positions instead of speculating. Very few platforms give an operator that much to work with, and the material is wasted if nobody keeps a dated series to test it against.

There is one factor on Deliveroo’s list that no internal system records: whether the listing was actually visible at the address and hour a customer looked. Deliveroo names opening hours as a position factor, and sites do not keep the hours they state, so the platform’s own metric and the operator’s own record disagree on a measurable share of days. On our July 2026 panel a UAE site lost 2.28 percent of its own stated trading hours. Kitchain (kitchain.co) captures whether the listing was shown at each measured point, which is the only place a quietly shrunk radius or an unnoticed closure leaves a trace an operator can date. Our per market view of Deliveroo sits at kitchain.co/aggregators/deliveroo/.