Reference
AI Visibility Glossary
The language of AI-mediated restaurant discovery. These terms define how we diagnose, measure, and correct signal integrity for restaurants.
Signal Integrity™
The methodology umbrella for everything we do. Signal Integrity is the degree to which a restaurant's digital presence transmits its actual identity to the machines that now mediate discovery. High integrity, the AI tells your story. Low integrity, it tells someone else's — or none at all.
Operator Vocabulary™
The specific, machine-legible language a restaurant uses to describe itself across menus, listings, profiles, and copy. Operator Vocabulary is the smallest unit of Signal Integrity. Swap one generic phrase for one concrete one and you have moved the signal.
Category Confidence
How sure an AI system is about what kind of restaurant you actually are. Category Confidence collapses when your language tries to be everything to everyone. It rises when every surface says the same specific thing.
Recommendation Confidence
The probability that an AI assistant will name your restaurant when a guest describes the occasion you were built for. Recommendation Confidence rests on four pillars: machine-readable menus, availability and proximity data, quotable content, and external authority.
Quotable Content / Quotability
Content written in a way that an AI can lift a single sentence out of it and hand that sentence to a guest as an answer. If a paragraph cannot be excerpted cleanly, it will not be quoted. If it is not quoted, it does not exist in the new discovery layer.
Experiential Metadata
The structured, objective rendering of subjective experience — turning vibe into operational data the machines can read. Dimly lit becomes 40-decibel average noise level. Intimate becomes 18-inch table spacing. This is the frontier of machine-readable hospitality.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
The industry term for designing your digital signal so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — recommend you directly inside the answer, not on a results page. AEO is the discipline. Signal Integrity is how we practice it for restaurants.
Occasion-Based Search
The way guests now describe what they want — by moment, mood, or occasion rather than by cuisine or rating. Where can I take my parents on Sunday before a 7pm show. The restaurant that wins is the one whose signal matches the occasion most precisely.
Semantic Dilution
What happens when a restaurant uses so many generic phrases — welcoming, vibrant, something for everyone — that the AI cannot form a sharp picture of who you are. The signal flattens. You become unrecommendable, not because you are bad, but because you are blurred.
Cross-Platform Corroboration
The same specific claim, repeated in your words on your site, in third-party words on review and guide platforms, and in guest words on social. Corroboration is what an AI uses to decide whether to trust a signal enough to repeat it.
The Aesthetic Trap
The failure mode of restaurants that look beautiful on Instagram and read as generic to a machine. Aesthetic gives you guests for a week. Signal gives you guests for a decade. The trap is mistaking the first for the second.
The Instagram Mirage
A close cousin of The Aesthetic Trap. The mirage is the belief that a strong social following equals strong discovery. It does not. Followers see you because they already know you. AI discovers you because your signal is legible to it.
The Amenity Trap
The failure mode specific to hotel restaurants, lounges, and on-site F&B. Their language tries to appeal to every type of hotel guest — business traveler, family, couple, conference attendee — and ends up meaning nothing to any of them. The result is semantic weakness, and an AI that describes them as located in the lobby of [Hotel Name] rather than as a destination in their own right.
The Anti-Marketing Strategy
The deliberate refusal to write the way marketing has trained operators to write. No vibrant, no curated, no something for everyone. The Anti-Marketing Strategy replaces the language of persuasion with the language of fact, because fact is what the machines actually read.
The Interpretation Tier Model
The six tiers an AI uses to interpret a restaurant, in descending order of strength. Tier 1, sharp category and occasion match. Tier 2, strong category, soft occasion. Tier 3, category recognised, no occasion. Tier 4, generic dining recommendation. Tier 5, location-based fallback. Tier 6, described only by what it is attached to — located in the lobby of [Hotel Name]. Every diagnostic places you on this ladder.
Guest Read
A diagnostic scan that places a restaurant on the Interpretation Tier Model and identifies exactly where the signal fragments. The Reading is the entry point to the methodology, not the end of it.
Signal Vault™
The Food Architect's self-serve operator workspace — where operators run Readings, apply the Operator Vocabulary, monitor Category and Recommendation Confidence, and use the Operator Action Engine to correct their signal over time.
The Witness, Not the Expert
Our operating stance toward ChatGPT and every other AI system. The machine is not the authority on your restaurant. It is the witness — the surface that reveals, in plain language, what the discovery layer currently believes about you. We do not optimise for the witness. We diagnose the gap between what the witness sees and what you actually are, and we close it.
The Four Gap Archetypes
Every Signal Integrity Reading resolves to one of four diagnostic archetypes. They describe the shape of the gap between your real identity and the identity the machines currently transmit. Each archetype has a different correction path.
Ghost Gap
The AI cannot see you at all. Asked for restaurants in your category, occasion, or neighbourhood, the machine does not name you. Not misrepresented — absent. The correction path is presence: machine-readable menu, structured listings, quotable third-party corroboration, and a sharp Operator Vocabulary the AI can lift.
Distortion Gap
The AI sees you, but describes a restaurant that is not yours. Wrong cuisine, wrong occasion, wrong price band, wrong vibe. Distortion is the most dangerous archetype because it actively misdirects the guests you were built for. The correction path is signal realignment — rewriting the surfaces the AI is quoting from until the description it returns matches the restaurant you actually run.
Commodity Gap
The AI sees you correctly but generically. You are named alongside ten others as a safe option in your category, with no language that distinguishes you. Commodity Gap is the failure mode of restaurants that write the way marketing taught them to write. The correction path is specificity — replacing every interchangeable phrase with a concrete, ownable detail only your restaurant could honestly claim.
Alignment
The AI describes you the way you would describe yourself, to the right guest, for the right occasion, with the right specifics. Alignment is not a permanent state. It is a posture maintained by repeated Readings, vocabulary discipline, and corroboration across platforms. It is the target state of every diagnostic we run.