So this weekend, I tried to be a person. A real, present, screen-free person. Digital detox, the whole thing.
That lasted about forty minutes before I landed on Reddit, which I told myself doesn’t count because Reddit is basically a library. An unhinged library run by strangers with very strong opinions, but a library nonetheless.
And then I found these threads:
I closed Reddit and thought that these were not bad questions. These are the honest, unglamorous questions that most restaurant owners are carrying quietly while running a full kitchen, managing a team, and handling eleven other things before noon.
Today, let’s actually get into it.
The case people make against websites
Let’s take the objections seriously first, because they come from real experience and real constraints.
“I’m already on Zomato and Swiggy.”
Fair point, and the traffic is genuinely there. But here’s what this arrangement actually looks like: you are one of 300 listings on a screen, ranked by an algorithm you didn’t design and can’t control, compared almost entirely on price and rating, and paying anywhere between 18–30% commission on every single order that comes through.
On 200 orders a month at a ₹500 average, that’s somewhere between ₹18,000 and ₹30,000 leaving your pocket every month. And the customer who just ordered from you tonight? Zomato has their name, their number, and their full order history.
You have a payout and no way to reach them again.
“My Instagram does the job.”
It does some of it, and for certain restaurants with a strong visual identity and an engaged following, it does quite a bit. But Instagram is rented land, and the rent can go up or disappear entirely without notice. One algorithm change, one account issue, and the audience you spent two years building is suddenly behind a wall you can’t get through.
“Google Maps is enough.”
For showing that you exist, sometimes. But Maps gives you a listing. A website gives you a voice, a story, a reason to choose you over the place next door with the same cuisine and the same rating.
What Reddit actually concluded
The debate across these threads was genuinely good, and the perspectives were real. But the consensus that emerged across hundreds of comments was this: a website is not optional, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Your address, your hours, your menu with actual prices, and one clear action for the visitor to take. That’s a front door that works.
One comment stopped me: “Your primary customer is Google. The search engine determines whether your restaurant survives or flourishes.”
That was written before AI search even became mainstream. Now think about what it means today.
The part these Reddit threads didn’t get into
Search is not just evolving. It has already changed.
The way people find restaurants today looks nothing like it did three years ago. A growing number of diners, and it’s not just Gen Z, this is moving fast across all age groups, don’t type into Google anymore. They ask.
They open ChatGPT and say: “Where should I take my parents for a quiet dinner in Pune this Saturday, they like coastal food, nothing too loud.” They ask Perplexity: “Best microbreweries in Mumbai with outdoor seating.” They hit Google’s AI Overview and get a direct answer before they ever scroll to a single listing below it.
This shift has a name: AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation. And the restaurants that understand it now are going to have a meaningful head start over everyone who figures it out two years from now.
Here’s how it works: AI systems don’t browse the internet the way a person does. They learn from content that already exists, structured pages, readable text, named and specific information about what a place is, where it is, what it serves, and what the experience is like.
When someone asks ChatGPT for a restaurant recommendation, it pulls from everything it has already read and made sense of, and it surfaces places it can actually describe with confidence.
If your restaurant has no website, AI has nothing to learn from, no way to understand who you are or what you offer. It will recommend the place down the road that has a website with three paragraphs about their kitchen philosophy and a readable menu. Just because it showed up and yours didn’t.
What a good restaurant website actually looks like
Look at what Doolally (doolally.in) has built. It’s not a brochure someone made and forgot. It’s a working tool: what’s on tap today, at which location, what events are coming up, and how to book a table.
Their whole personality is sitting in a URL they own outright. That’s brand voice living somewhere no algorithm can touch, no platform can take down, and no commission can eat into.
That’s the standard. And if you’re wondering what it actually takes to build something like that, we broke it down properly. Everything from structure to what goes on each page to how you make it work for search.
What to actually do this week
“Build a website” is not an action. It’s a project. So let’s break it down.
If you don’t have a website at all, the first step is not finding a developer. It’s writing down four things: who you are in two sentences, your full menu with prices, your hours and address, and the one action you most want a visitor to take, whether that’s booking a table, placing a direct order, or calling you. That’s your brief.
If you have a website but it’s just sitting there, open it right now and check one thing: is your menu a PDF? If yes, that’s your most urgent fix. A PDF is invisible to search engines and unreadable to AI. Convert it to a real page with text, actual dish names, actual prices, and actual descriptions. That single change improves your searchability more than most things you could do.
If your website is functional but generic, think about the words on it. “Welcome to our restaurant” does nothing. “Slow-cooked coastal food in a quiet corner of Bandra” tells Google, tells ChatGPT, and tells a tired person scrolling at midnight exactly what you are and whether you’re right for them. Specificity is not just good writing. It’s how you get found.
And whatever the state of your website, connect it to something that captures your customer before they leave. A reservation form. A loyalty sign-up. A direct ordering link. Because the whole point isn’t just to be discovered.
It’s to own the relationship once someone finds you, so you’re not starting from zero every single month, paying a platform to reintroduce you to people who already ate at your table.
I went on a digital detox and ended up more online than ever. But at least I found something worth sharing
Until next Monday!