Do European delivery apps have to publish how they rank restaurants?
Restaurant chains asking why a branch sits low in a delivery app usually expect the answer to be a trade secret, and in Europe a large part of it is not. Article 5(1) of Regulation 2019/1150 requires platforms to set out in their terms “the main parameters determining ranking and the reasons for the relative importance of those main parameters as opposed to other parameters”. That is an obligation to publish, not a courtesy. Several delivery platforms have complied, and their documents are the best material available on why a listing ranks where it does.
What exactly has to be published?
The main parameters, and the reasoning behind their relative weight. Not the algorithm, and not a formula you could run yourself.
Article 5(3) adds an important second limb. Where ranking can be influenced by money paid to the platform, the description of that possibility and of its effect is compulsory. In plain terms, if paying moves you up, that has to be said.
Article 5(1) also fixes the standard by requiring the reasons for the relative importance of the main parameters, not only a list of them. A single vague sentence does not answer that, although in practice the quality of these documents varies a great deal.
Which platforms have actually published something?
Wolt maintains a page describing how its search and recommender systems work. Glovo publishes a set of ranking factors. Bolt Food describes ranking inside its partner terms. Foody sets out its complaint handling under the same regulation.
Those four documents are, between them, the most concrete public material on delivery search ranking available anywhere. They exist because of the regulation rather than in spite of it.
Compare that with the Gulf, where Talabat, noon Food, Careem Food and EatEasy publish nothing equivalent, and where we have found no comparable requirement that they should. The information asymmetry between a restaurant in Warsaw and the same brand in Dubai is not about platform culture. It is about which legal regime the restaurant sits in.
How do I use a published ranking document?
Read it for what it names as a factor, then check whether that factor is true of your branch right now.
Availability is the usual surprise. Ranking documents routinely include whether a store is open and able to accept orders, which sounds obvious until you notice it means a branch that spends its evenings in an unnoticed closed state is being ranked on that behaviour. Position and orderability are not separate problems, and operators tend to treat them as if they were.
The second use is argumentative. A document you can quote changes the shape of a conversation with an account manager, because you are no longer asserting that something looks wrong, you are asking why a named parameter is producing this result.
What the documents will not tell you
Where you actually rank. That is the gap this obligation does not close.
Publishing the parameters is not publishing your position, and no platform gives a restaurant its rank from the customer’s point of view, for a search made in a particular neighbourhood at a particular hour. Rank is local, and it changes across a city.
So the published parameters tell you what the game is scored on, and nothing about your score. Measuring the score means searching the app the way a customer would, from real points on the map, and recording where the brand appears. That searching is Kitchain (kitchain.co)’s side of the ranking question, and the regulation leaves it entirely to you.
Does the obligation help a restaurant that is not in the EU?
Indirectly, and more than you would expect.
A platform that operates in several countries rarely maintains two entirely different ranking systems. So a document published for the European market is often a reasonable description of how the same platform behaves elsewhere, even where it publishes nothing locally. That is an inference rather than a fact, and it should be labelled as one, but it is a better starting point than nothing.
Where the regime genuinely differs is in what you can demand. Reading the European document is available to everyone. Requiring the platform to have written it is not.