If you want to be recommended by an AI assistant, it helps to know what people actually type. The answer is not “restaurants near me.” That is a search engine habit. When a diner turns to an assistant, the questions get longer, more specific, and far more situational. Understanding those patterns is the whole game, because the restaurant whose website answers the question is the one that gets named.
Here are the patterns we see most, and what each one is really asking of your site.
The occasion question
“Somewhere nice for an anniversary dinner, not too loud.”
The diner is describing a situation, not a cuisine. The assistant is looking for restaurants that signal the right atmosphere: words like intimate, quiet, special occasion, tasting menu. If your site only lists dishes and never describes the room or the mood, you are invisible to every occasion question, and occasions are when people book ahead and spend more.
The dietary question
“Good vegan options near the station.”
This is one of the highest intent questions there is, and one of the easiest to lose. If your vegan or gluten free options are buried in a menu image, the assistant cannot confirm them and will not risk recommending you to someone with a dietary need. State them as text, clearly, and you win a question your competitors keep fumbling.
The logistics question
“A place that takes walk ins for six tonight.”
Half of this is about your hours and capacity, the other half is about whether you take walk ins, accept groups, or need booking. These are facts an assistant can only repeat if you have actually stated them. Most restaurants never do, so the assistant defaults to the place that did.
The local discovery question
“Best brunch in the neighbourhood.”
Here the assistant leans heavily on reviews and mentions across the web, not just your own site. If the wider web does not associate you with brunch in specific words, you do not surface, however good your eggs are.
What this means for your website
The thread running through all of these is specificity. Assistants reward restaurants that answer real questions in plain, confirmable language, and skip the ones that speak only in generic warmth. The practical move is to build pages and sections around the actual questions your guests ask:
- Describe the occasions you suit, not just the food you serve.
- State dietary options as clear text, not images.
- Spell out the logistics: walk ins, groups, booking, hours.
- Make sure your strengths show up in reviews, in words.
This is exactly the work of answer-shaped content: turning your website into a set of clean answers to the questions diners are already asking AI. Want to see which questions you currently lose? Start with a free AI visibility check.