Why your restaurant is not showing in Foody search

Restaurant operators on Foody are not guessing about ranking, because Foody publishes the list. Its vendor terms name eight main parameters that set the display order, and the eighth is money: “Outstanding debt of the Partner to the Company exceeding 90 days.” Delivery address, day and time, order volume, participation in “1+1” offers, catalogue size, average rating and use of Foody’s own delivery service make up the other seven. The list is Foody’s own contract wording, and the same document sets a separate 60 day debt limit on paid placement.

What are the eight ranking parameters Foody publishes?

They sit in clause 2.4 of the “General Terms and Conditions for Business Users”, version 6.0, valid from 1 June 2026 and issued by “Delivery Hero (Cyprus) Ltd” trading as Foody. The clause opens by saying that “The display method and order of Customers on the Company’s Website and Application are determined by the following main parameters”, and then names them:

> ● User Address (stores serving the address are shown in closer proximity to the User. If multiple Partners belonging to the same chain of stores serve a User’s location, only the locally closest store may be displayed to the User), > ● Time and Day of the week (more relevant options are shown to users) > ● Number and average value of Partner orders and overall popularity (member of a store chain, placement in users’ “favorites”). > ● Partner participation in promotional activities such as “1+1” offers and the number of orders made by the Partner under “1+1 Offers,” both overall and for a short period defined by the company. > ● Number of active products of the Partner in their listed catalog. > ● Average Partner Ratings from Users. > ● Use of the Delivery Service by the Partner. > ● Outstanding debt of the Partner to the Company exceeding 90 days.

Immediately below the list Foody adds a ninth input in plain prose, writing that “The display method is also affected by the ratio of visits to completed orders.” That one is worth reading twice. A listing many customers open and few order from is scored on that behaviour, so a broken menu, a long quoted delivery time or a surprise minimum order value does not only cost those orders. It feeds back into how often the listing is shown at all.

Why does an unpaid Foody invoice change where your store appears?

Because Foody wrote it into the ranking clause rather than into the collections clause. The document actually carries three separate debt thresholds and they do different things. At thirty days, clause 5.4.3 lists “The Partner’s failure to pay their debts to the Company within thirty (30) days from the date of issuance of the relevant invoice” among the grounds for suspension or deletion. At sixty days, the eligibility conditions for paid placement require the Partner “Not to have outstanding debts to the Company as mentioned in terms 4.2 and 4.3 below, for a period exceeding 60 days”. At ninety days, the debt becomes a ranking parameter.

For a chain this changes who owns the problem. A disputed invoice sitting with a finance team is normally a finance matter on a finance deadline, and nobody in operations expects it to move a storefront down a list. On Foody it does. If a Cypriot brand sees a gradual decline across every branch at once, with no menu change and no rating change behind it, the ageing report is a legitimate place to look before the marketing calendar is.

What happens on Foody when two of your branches serve the same address?

Only one of them is shown. The address parameter carries a rule aimed squarely at multi site brands: “If multiple Partners belonging to the same chain of stores serve a User’s location, only the locally closest store may be displayed to the User.” Foody is filtering your own estate before the customer sees it, and the filter is distance, not performance.

The practical effect is that a branch can be invisible at an address it is fully configured to serve, and nothing in that branch is wrong. Overlapping delivery zones, which elsewhere cost a brand nothing worse than internal competition, on Foody remove one storefront from the screen. A brand reading its own coverage sees the address as covered, because it is. The customer there is only ever offered the nearer kitchen, so a quiet branch may be losing to a sibling rather than to a competitor.

What moves the Foody ranking beyond the eight named parameters?

Three further layers, all named by Foody. The first is personal history and machine learning: the ranking “is affected by data such as the User’s interaction history with the Store (e.g. previous orders), the User’s preferences (e.g. response to offers, frequency of use), as well as geographic and time-based delivery statistics”, worked through “machine learning algorithms”. The second is the customer’s own filters, including favourites. The third is stated flatly, that “the basic ranking algorithm is affected by the use of additional services provided by the Company”.

There is also a starting advantage that expires. Foody writes that “every new Partner is displayed at the top of the organic search results in the list of stores serving the specific user’s address at the beginning of their cooperation with the Company and for a certain period”. No length is given. A brand that judged Foody on its first weeks measured a boosted position, so the sensible read of a drop a month or two after launch is not that something broke, but that the introductory placement ended.

Can a Foody store buy a position at the top of the list?

Yes, and the paid product is described separately from the organic one. Clause 2.8 calls it “Recommended Positions”, sold by calendar month and by postal code area. It has two named shapes. “Recommended Based on Availability” places stores “in selected positions on the Website and the Application during their operating hours, provided that they serve the User’s address”, charged “either per impression (Cost per Mille – CPM) or per click (Cost Per Click – CPC)”. “Recommended Based on Cuisine Filter” puts stores “at the top of the restaurant list when the User selects a filter based on cuisine”, at a fixed “Cost Per Placement – CPP”.

Eligibility is cumulative and it is short enough to check today. Foody requires a partner to “Have an average rating of Users over 3.5”, to offer card payment, to have no debts older than 60 days, and to have been “active on the Website / Application for at least 30 days”. So a rating slipping under 3.5 does not just look bad. It removes the ability to buy placement at the moment a brand most wants it, at the same threshold that gates the “Piniata” and loyalty coupon services.

What can a Foody partner do when the ranking looks wrong?

There is a written complaint route, which is unusual enough to use. Clause 10.2 describes an Internal System for handling Partner complaints, provided free, covering “conduct or measures of the Company related to the Services that affect the Partner and its activity”. A complaint is filed through the partner portal, must describe the issue “with reference to specific details”, and Foody undertakes to answer in writing “no later than 30 working days from its receipt”. Foody also commits to publishing annual data on how well that system works, under European Regulation 2019/1150 rather than as a courtesy.

That route rewards evidence and punishes impressions. The revision history at the back of the same document shows why dated evidence matters: the ranking rules were changed in four of the six revisions, in June 2021, August 2022, February 2025 and again in February 2026, when machine learning criteria were added to clause 2.4. Positions recorded before a revision are not comparable with positions recorded after it unless you know when you took them.

What should a Cyprus chain actually watch on Foody?

Position from real addresses, on a schedule, per branch. Six of the eight parameters are things a brand influences slowly, and two of them, the address rule and the day and hour, mean a single reading tells you almost nothing. Because Foody decides between your own branches by distance before the customer sees either of them, the reading has to be taken from customer addresses rather than from the partner portal, which shows you both stores as healthy. Kitchain (kitchain.co) opens the same public storefront a customer opens, from points across the city, and keeps the position history alongside the cuisine filter the store was found under.

Two habits make the difference. Record the hour with the position, because time of day is a published parameter, and record which branch appeared rather than whether the brand appeared, because the chain rule makes those different questions. What else we watch on this platform is at https://kitchain.co/aggregators/foody/.