What should an AI-search audit cost for a restaurant group?

Ask for an AI-search audit price against a named list of venues, guest questions and deliverables. A free website scan, a paid restaurant-group audit and a monthly monitoring subscription cover different work. Before comparing fees, establish whether the supplier will test each venue, retain the answers, explain incorrect recommendations and give your team a usable repair plan.

This guide uses published international offers and UK tax and privacy examples. US operators should confirm their local contract, tax and privacy requirements.

There is no verified hospitality-wide average price in the sources below. Public offers show how much scope varies, rather than what your group should pay. The useful buying question is: what decision will this audit let us make, and what evidence will we receive?

What are you actually buying?

An audit can help you decide whether guests can find the right venue for the right occasion. It should also identify incorrect facts, inaccessible pages and broken routes from a recommendation to a menu or booking. Those questions need more than a score for the group homepage.

This distinction changes the quotation. A supplier checking five pages is doing a different job from one recording hundreds of answers across several venues. Neither price alone tells you which service is useful.

Google's AI-feature guidance says that ordinary SEO fundamentals remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode. There is no special AI markup requirement. A report recommending a new file or schema should explain the actual problem it solves, rather than treating the addition as a ticket into AI answers.

What do published audit prices tell us?

These are three specific public offers checked on 28 September 2026, in their advertised currencies. They are not restaurant-group quotations, a market average or a ranking of providers. We offer AI-search services ourselves; the examples below compare published scope rather than endorse a supplier.

A lower fee can buy a useful initial check. A higher fee can buy broader evidence or more human interpretation. Ask to see a representative deliverable and match its contents to your decision. Do not convert these prices into a suggested UK range: currencies, tax, markets and deliverables differ.

For a UK quotation, ask whether the amount includes VAT and whether software, additional engines, extra venues and repeat checks are included. The UK's standard VAT rate is 20%, but the treatment of your specific purchase depends on the supplier and transaction. A clearly written total is more useful than a low headline followed by unpriced extras.

Which parts of restaurant-group scope change the price?

The number of venues matters, but it is not the only measure of work. Five sites sharing one concept and menu can need a different audit from five unrelated concepts in different cities.

Agree these scope items before the supplier estimates the work:

1. Venues: every site, a named sample, or only the parent brand. State which is included.
2. Guest occasions: genuine reasons to visit, such as pre-theatre dinner, business lunch or a table for a larger party. Avoid testing features the venue does not offer.
3. Markets and languages: the cities and languages in which guests search. A German-language check is separate from an English one.
4. AI services: name the products and modes being tested. A ChatGPT answer and a Google AI Overview are different observations.
5. Repeat checks: state whether the report contains a one-off view or comparable checks on several dates.
6. Website and listings: list the venue pages, menus, Business Profiles and relevant booking or delivery listings to inspect.
7. Human interpretation: identify who will investigate wrong branches, stale opening hours, missing information and unusable booking links.
8. Follow-through: separate the audit, implementation and retest. A recommendation is not a completed correction.

Keep a short table with venue, occasion, market and included checks. It makes exclusions visible. If only three of twelve sites are sampled, the report should say which three and avoid presenting their results as a measured finding for the other nine.

What evidence should the report contain?

Ask for enough detail to check a finding without buying the same audit again. A screenshot of an attractive visibility chart does not tell you whether the wrong branch was counted as a success.

To check whether search systems can read your pages, OpenAI's search guidance describes allowing OAI-SearchBot and the relevant published IP traffic. Being readable does not guarantee that a restaurant will be recommended. The audit should distinguish a confirmed access block from a page that was accessible but not selected.

For venue facts, Google's LocalBusiness documentation describes address, opening hours, menu and location-specific URLs. Ask whether visible page information matches the structured data. A valid test result is useful evidence about implementation; it is not proof of recommendation uplift.

How should a buyer challenge an impressive result?

Ask what was counted. A mention of the parent brand, the correct venue and a link to the venue's booking page are three different results. A guest asking for a late table near a station needs the relevant site, not another restaurant in the group.

Look for these warning signs:

• A percentage with no question count, date window or underlying answers.
• Branded questions presented as evidence of discovery by guests who do not know the restaurant.
• A group-wide score that hides venues with wrong or absent information.
• Claims that a file, review count or schema guarantees recommendations.
• Booking or revenue claims supported only by online mentions.

The ASA's substantiation guidance explains that objective advertising claims require supporting evidence. As a buyer, apply the same practical test to a supplier's performance claim: ask for the measurement behind it and the scope it actually covers. Testimonials are useful context; they do not establish that your group will achieve the same result.

What access does the supplier need?

A first assessment of public pages and answers may not require access to guest records at all. Ask the supplier to explain each requested system and permission. If it needs analytics or Search Console, agree how that access will be granted and removed.

Search Console can help inspect Google search performance and indexing. It does not provide a complete restaurant booking record. OpenAI's publisher FAQ describes the ChatGPT referral parameter, which can help identify trackable arrivals. It cannot reveal every guest who saw an answer and later booked elsewhere.

Keep personal data out of a visibility report unless there is a clear, necessary purpose. The ICO's data-minimisation guidance requires personal data to be limited to what is necessary. Where a supplier processes personal data on your behalf, review the relevant controller and processor contract requirements. A restaurant-group discovery audit is not a reason to export an entire guest database.

What should you put in the quote request?

Send the same brief to each supplier. Fill in the blanks below with facts your team can verify:

We operate [number] venues in [cities], covering [concepts]. Please quote for [all venues or named sample] in [markets and languages]. We need a documented baseline of guest-style questions, captured answers and factual errors, inspection of the listed venue pages and profiles, and a prioritized repair plan with owners. State the services tested, number of questions, dates, exclusions, access required, software costs, tax treatment and whether implementation or a retest is included. Please provide a representative anonymized deliverable and explain how we can retain our results if we stop working together.

Ask the supplier to respond to that brief line by line. A quotation that leaves the sample, exclusions or handover unclear is not ready to compare, even if the headline fee is attractive.

When is a free audit enough?

A free diagnostic can be enough to establish whether further investigation is worthwhile, or identify a small set of obvious problems. It is less useful when the team already needs a complete restaurant-group baseline, a development brief or evidence for choosing which venues receive budget first.

Start with a free AI-search audit if your immediate question is where the group is missing. Bring the venue list and guest occasions. Commission deeper work when the next decision requires named-site evidence, a clear repair owner and an agreed retest. Buy the depth needed for that decision, and make the handover part of the price.

Sources

1. AI-feature guidance.
2. QueryLantern Full Audit.
3. Motionexa Labs Visibility Audit.
4. Tenten GEO Audit.
5. standard VAT rate is 20%.
6. OpenAI's search guidance.
7. Google's LocalBusiness documentation.
8. ASA's substantiation guidance.
9. Search Console.
10. OpenAI's publisher FAQ.
11. ICO's data-minimisation guidance.
12. controller and processor contract requirements.