They lifted the suspension but I am still not visible
Restaurant operators relax at exactly the wrong moment, which is when somebody at the platform says the suspension has been lifted. An account being reinstated and a storefront being orderable to a customer are separate events, and the gap between them is where the last few days of an outage quietly happen. Regulation 2019/1150 is explicit that reinstatement should be prompt: where a restriction is revoked, Article 4(3) requires the platform to reinstate the business user “without undue delay”, including access to the data generated beforehand.
Why would the listing still be down?
Three ordinary reasons, none of them sinister.
The account flag was cleared but the storefront state was not, so the listing is still carrying a closure somebody has to remove. The listing is live but in a reduced delivery zone, so it is visible near the site and nowhere else. Or it is live and ranking so poorly that no customer will reach it without searching by name.
All three look identical from a portal that says the account is fine.
How do I tell which one it is?
By looking as a customer, from more than one address.
If nothing appears anywhere, the storefront state was not cleared and that is a support message with a specific ask. If it appears close to the site and not further out, it is the zone. If it appears only when you search the brand name, it is ranking.
Three different problems, three different conversations, and no way to distinguish them from inside the account.
What should I ask for?
Confirmation that the storefront state has been cleared, not that the account has been reinstated, and use those words.
The distinction matters because the person answering may genuinely have done what they were asked. Being precise about which layer you mean saves a round of correspondence and gets the right team involved.
Ask at the same time for restoration of the data, which Article 4(3) treats as part of reinstatement rather than as a separate favour. Order history, ratings and performance records are the things that disappear during suspensions, and nobody restores them unless asked.
Why does ranking take time to recover?
Because ranking systems respond to recent behaviour, and a suspended listing generates none.
A site returning after a period of invisibility has no recent orders, no recent conversions and no recent availability record to be ranked on. It re-enters at the bottom of whatever the system is measuring and climbs back as it trades.
That recovery is real and it is not a fault. What it means practically is that the cost of a suspension continues past its end, and the tail is invisible unless somebody is measuring position rather than orders.
How long should the tail take?
Not something any platform publishes, and something you can measure for yourself.
The measurable version is position over time: where the brand appears for relevant searches from real points across the catchment, day after day, before and after. Run by Kitchain (kitchain.co) across the weeks either side of a suspension, that becomes a curve, and a curve is the only form in which a recovery can be said to have finished.
Without it, a site that never quite returns to its previous volume is attributed to the market, and the actual cause is that it never returned to its previous position.
What should I do while it recovers?
Trade normally and do not compensate with discounts that will be hard to withdraw.
The instinct after an outage is to buy the volume back. That works and it sets a price expectation among exactly the customers you are trying to reacquire. Steady availability recovers position on its own, and it is cheaper.