Ran the numbers across restaurant listings on Nearby Eats and the pattern is obvious: 80% of clicks go to the top 3 results in any search. Everyone below that is basically invisible, no matter how good the food is.

Three things that actually move the needle for restaurant owners:

1. Photos over descriptions. Listings with 5+ real photos (not stock) get way more clicks than ones with a paragraph of text. People decide with their eyes first.

2. Category specificity wins. "Italian restaurant" loses to "wood-fired pizza" every time. Niche down your category tags.

3. Visibility is rentable, not just earnable. Organic ranking takes months of reviews and orders to build. If you're new or in a saturated category, paying for placement (we just launched tiered boosts — neighborhood, category, citywide) is the fastest way to get in front of people who are already hungry and searching nearby.

If you run a restaurant and aren't getting the foot traffic you expect from being listed online — it's usually a visibility problem, not a food problem.

This is a website where you can look for restaurants online that don’t have that much visibility

I started Nearby Eats because I kept watching independent restaurants pour money into boosted posts and generic ads that vanish in 24 hours and never turn into a table filled.

Here's the thing nobody tells restaurant owners: discovery, not persuasion, is the actual problem. People aren't refusing to eat at your restaurant — they just don't know it exists when they're standing on a street corner starving and opening their phone.

That's a completely different problem than the one most marketing tools solve. Ads try to convince. Discovery tools just need to show up at the right moment — when someone nearby is already searching for "where to eat."

So instead of another ad platform, we built a directory that puts featured restaurants at the top of local search and category browsing, for less than the cost of one boosted Instagram post. No creative to make, no targeting to guess at — just consistent placement in front of hungry people nearby.

If you run a restaurant and are tired of guessing with ad spend, this might be worth a look.