No Restaurant Can Pay to Reach You First

Every app that helps you find somewhere to eat has a ranking formula. Almost none of them will tell you what it is, because once you see it you can usually see who paid.

Here is ours, in full. This is the actual expression that decides the order of your results, copied from the code that runs it.

priorityScore = fit × 100
                + 1 if the restaurant has verified its listing

That is the whole thing. The highest score any restaurant can reach is 96. There is no term in it for money, and there is no term in it for you.

What "fit" actually measures

Pick one of six moods: stressed, romantic, celebratory, craving, calm or comfort. Each one is a real question about a room rather than a category of food. Can you hear each other. Is the lighting forgiving. Will a table of eight be a problem.

We answer it from what people who went there already wrote. Reviews are read and scored against the mood you chose, and that score is almost all of fit. A restaurant may also tag itself with the moods it believes it suits, but a self-declared tag only counts once the reviews already agree, and even then it moves the number by a rounding error. A claim about yourself is the weakest evidence there is, so it is weighted like it.

The +1, and why it is small on purpose

A restaurant that has claimed and verified its listing gets exactly one point. That is a data quality signal: somebody has confirmed the opening hours are real and the phone number reaches the kitchen.

One point cannot overturn a better fit. It separates two restaurants the reviews rank equally, and that is all it can ever do. We made it one rather than ten precisely so it could never become a thing worth buying.

The part most companies would leave out

Money cannot change the order. It can, in one case, add an entry.

A restaurant can pay for a featured placement, and a featured placement can put a restaurant in front of you that Google's own results did not return. What it cannot do is move anything up. It enters the set with the same score as everything else and is sorted by the same formula, and paid placements are kept structurally apart from organic results rather than seeded among them.

We would rather write that down than have you find it. "Ranking is never for sale" is true of the sort. It is not a claim that money does nothing anywhere, and anyone telling you money does nothing anywhere is selling you something.

Nothing about you is in the formula either

There is no profile of you in the score. Two people searching the same mood in the same place get the same order, whether one of them has used MoodBite for a year and the other signed up this morning. Your history does not quietly reshape what you are shown, because it is not an input.

That is a deliberate decision rather than a feature we have not built yet. A system that learns what you click starts showing you what you will click, which is not the same as what you will enjoy, and the gap between those two is where most recommendation products go wrong.

What leaves your device, exactly

You can type, speak or photograph.

Speaking. Your voice never reaches us. Speech to text happens in your browser, on your device, and what we receive is the text it produced. We have no recording to keep, lose or hand over, because we never had one.

Photographing. Point your camera at a dish and we will work out what it is and search for it. The image is read once and discarded. It is not stored, not logged and never written to the database.

Typing. Your words go to Google Gemini, which turns a sentence into something searchable. Your location does not go with them. Gemini is told what you want to eat and never where you are.

There is no advertising technology on MoodBite, no third-party analytics, and we do not sell your data. Photographs you upload have their location and camera information stripped before they are stored.

Asking a restaurant something directly

On any restaurant page you can ask a question in plain language and get an answer built from that restaurant's own details. Is it quiet enough for a work breakfast. Is there a table that fits a pushchair.

Three rules it cannot break. It only knows about the one restaurant you are looking at. It is told what it does not know and has to say so rather than guess. And it is forbidden to invent a number, a price or an opening time.

An assistant that confidently makes something up is worse than no assistant, because you cannot tell which answer was the invented one.

What it costs

You can try it without an account: two mood searches and two conversations, no sign-up. A free account gets two mood searches every thirty days and two conversations a month. MoodBite Pro raises that to thirty searches and two hundred conversations, and adds photo search and travel mode.

Those are real numbers enforced by the server, not soft limits.

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Most of this is the sort of thing a company keeps in a document nobody outside it reads. We would rather publish the formula and be held to it. If the order ever stops matching the expression at the top of this page, you will be able to tell.