🔎 Week 5: Getting Found

You might have great food, great prep, and solid service - but if the delivery platforms aren’t ranking you well, customers may never see you.

Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat all use ranking algorithms to decide which restaurants show up first in search results or featured carousels. While the exact formulas are private, what we do know is that the algorithm rewards restaurants that are easy to promote and deliver great and consistent customer experiences.

You don’t need to game the algorithm, just understand what it values so you can get found, which above all is consistency. Here are the core drivers of visibility:

You should treat your rating as a complete view of your customers' experience. Though the quality of the food alone can dictate this, any of the below drivers can also affect how a customer rates you.

This is how long the customer actually waits from when they make the order, typically calculated as 'Estimated Order Duration'. EOD = time to prep food + time to load vehicle with food + time to travel to customer.
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For example: EOD 25 mins = 15 mins prep time + 3 mins loading + 7 mins travel.

Both indicate unreliability and inconsistency to the platforms. Inaccurate orders are one of the biggest causes of a lost customer.

Being open when you say you are, and not closing your restaurant on the tablets during busy periods or peak traffic on Fridays and Saturdays.

How often someone orders after viewing your menu. This is under Sessions' control mostly, but includes photography, menu structure, the 'feel' of the menu.

The better you perform, the more the platforms will push your restaurant. But performance alone isn’t always enough — promotions boost visibility, directly.

Discounts feel like they cut into margin, so this one is worth understanding rather than just accepting. The platforms reward and prioritise restaurants that run promotions - even modest ones - with more visibility, more traffic, and better placement, because they convert better, retain customers, and increase basket size (Average Order Value (AOV).

Remember, promotions aren’t just about price - they’re how the platform decides who to show customers first. At Sessions, we strategically manage promotions for you, using platform data to decide:

It’s not about offering constant discounts - it’s about using promotions to trigger the algorithm to reward your brand with better placement and higher conversion. You don’t have to manage this - but it’s important to understand why it’s happening.

When you pair that with strong kitchen execution? That’s how you rise to the top.

Your five key metrics matter more from here than they did during the 30-day boost period, because now they are the only thing carrying you.

Open your Sessions Dashboard and check all five against the standard, and anything below it you should act on them now. Not sure what a number means or what good looks like? Go back to Know Your Numbers for the breakdown.

Standards don't hold on their own, they hold because someone keeps refreshing them. A team trained once at launch can easily drift by week 7 without anyone deciding to let it happen; a team walked through the videos again, regularly, doesn't.

You can navigate freely between each section if you want to revisit some information.