Why your restaurant is not showing in Glovo search

Glovo tells restaurant operators more about its ranking than almost any platform in the category, in two separate documents that say different things. A partner news article headed “Discover Glovo’s new ranking for positioning on the app” states that “Our new ranking at Glovo is based on 4 factors” and names them. The partner terms and conditions add a clause on ranking parameters and a separate clause on paid position. Between the two, a store that has slipped out of view usually has a documented explanation, and it is often the least dramatic one on the list.

What are the four factors in Glovo’s ranking?

Glovo names them as “Conversion Rate”, “Partner Performance”, “Newness” and “Distance Factor”. Each carries a one-line gloss in Glovo’s own words. Conversion is framed as “How can stores convert better”. Partner Performance is framed as “Offer a better experience to your customers”. Newness is stated as “When you are new, we will give you more visibility on the app”. Distance is stated as “Closer options to customer will be considered first”.

Glovo does not publish weights, and nothing here should be read as one. What the four names do establish is the shape of the problem. Two factors are things a restaurant can move, one is a property of the calendar, and one is a property of the customer’s address. That last point alone rules out the most common misreading of a Glovo visibility complaint, which is treating a report from one part of a city as a statement about the brand across the whole city.

Does a new Glovo store get a boost, and what happens when it ends?

Glovo lists “Newness” as one of the four factors and describes it as extra visibility given to new partners. It does not publish how long the effect lasts, and we are not going to invent a number. What matters is that the factor exists and is temporary by its own description, which produces a pattern that catches out chains opening several locations in sequence.

A branch opens, performs well for its first stretch, and then appears to decline without anything changing in the kitchen. Read against Glovo’s own list, the likely explanation is that the newness contribution has faded and the branch is now being ranked on the other three factors alone. That is not a failure to investigate, it is a baseline to establish. The mistake it causes is worse than the drop itself, because a chain that reads a newness taper as an operational problem will chase a cause that was never there.

The defence against it is unglamorous. Measure the branch from its first week, at fixed addresses, and keep the readings. A chain that has the opening curve on record can see the taper for what it is, and can also see the level the branch settles at, which is the number that actually predicts its performance. A chain measuring for the first time in month four has no way to distinguish a fading boost from a genuine decline, and will usually assume the more alarming of the two.

Does Glovo have to tell partners before it changes the ranking?

Its partner terms say it will give notice. The relevant clause states that “GLOVO reserves the right to use the parameters it deems convenient for the classification and positioning” of the partner within the app, and then commits to a notice period: “GLOVO will notify the PARTNER fifteen (15) days in advance of any substantial change in the aforementioned parameters.” The same clause describes the main parameters as including “GLOVO users’ preferences, partners’ performance, among others”, together with orders performance, pick-up and delivery area, radius and estimated delivery time.

Fifteen days is a specific, checkable commitment and very few platforms in this category offer one. Its practical value depends entirely on having a record of your positions from before the notice arrived, because a notice about a parameter change is only actionable if you can tell what it did to you. A chain that learns of the change and has no dated baseline receives the notice as trivia. A chain with a baseline receives it as a hypothesis it can test within a fortnight.

What does Glovo call paid position and what does it say it buys?

The partner terms address this in a clause of their own. Glovo “reserves the right to implement sponsored visibility actions, paid by any of its PARTNERs”, and states that these “may affect the classification and positioning of the PARTNERS within the APP and the parameters referred to above”. The examples given include “cross-selling actions, targeted sampling, as well as higher or more convenient positioning within the App, all of them in exchange for a certain price”. Glovo adds a fairness commitment: it “will ensure that the said sponsored visibility actions will take place always on a non-discriminatory basis”.

On the partner-facing side the product is named simply. Glovo’s own site describes “Ads” as “Create Ads in Glovo App to boost visibility”, listed alongside “Promotions” and “Menu Optimisation”. So position on Glovo is a blend of the four organic factors and whatever paid actions are running in that area at that hour. A competitor above you today may have bought that place for the week, and the honest way to record the observation is with the date attached.

Does a Glovo customer’s address decide which stores exist at all?

The “Distance Factor” statement, “Closer options to customer will be considered first”, describes ordering within a candidate set, and the terms separately reference pick-up and delivery area and radius as parameters. Both point the same way: a Glovo listing is assembled around a delivery address, not around a city. A restaurant asking why it is not showing in Glovo search is asking a question that has no answer until the address is named.

This is why the single most useful change a chain can make to its internal reporting is to stop asking “where do we rank on Glovo” and start asking “where do we rank at these twelve addresses”. The first question cannot be answered and therefore never gets a number attached, which is why these conversations recur every quarter without progress. The second produces a table, and a table can be compared with last month’s table.

What should a Glovo operator record when a position moves?

Four things, because Glovo has told you which four matter. Record the position, the address it was taken from, the time, and whether the listings above yours were carrying anything that reads as paid or promoted. Glovo’s own factor list makes conversion and partner performance the levers you own, distance a constant you cannot change, and newness a clock you cannot stop, which narrows the space of plausible causes to something a team can actually work through.

The factor Glovo names first, conversion rate, is also the one most sensitive to being unavailable when customers look, since a store that cannot take the order converts nothing while remaining in the count of times it was shown. Kitchain (kitchain.co) captures the whole listing card at each measured point, including whether the store was shown open and what the competitors above it were offering, which is the only way to tell a conversion problem apart from an availability problem after the fact. What else we watch on this platform is at https://kitchain.co/aggregators/glovo/.