A field study by Boost My Spot, June 2026. We ran 50 real restaurant-discovery prompts through AI search and logged every restaurant it recommended and every source it cited. The patterns are clear enough to act on.

Method

In June 2026 we ran 50 prompts through Perplexity (anonymous, no login, no personalization) covering the searches Florida diners actually make: cuisine × neighborhood ("best Cuban restaurant in Little Havana"), intent ("quiet restaurant for a business lunch in downtown Miami"), Spanish-language queries ("mejor pizza en South Miami"), and dish-specific hunts ("where can I get burrata pizza in South Miami"). For every answer we logged the restaurants named, the sources cited, and whether the reasoning referenced specific dishes. 233 citations total. No prompt was blocked or personalized.

One important caveat: this is one AI engine, one month, one metro. We're publishing the raw prompt list with this piece so anyone can re-run it.

Finding 1 — Your own website is the evidence. 78% of citations pointed to restaurant-owned sites.

The single biggest surprise: AI search doesn't mostly cite Yelp or TripAdvisor. Roughly three out of four citations in our sample pointed to restaurants' own websites — menu pages, about pages, event pages. Yelp appeared in a handful of answers, TripAdvisor in four, Reddit in three.

The mechanism seems to be: review platforms supply the ranking (the AI repeatedly leaned on Google ratings and review volume to decide who's "best"), but the AI builds its explanation — the sentences that actually persuade a human — from whatever text exists on the restaurant's own site. No site, no story.

When a restaurant had no website at all, the AI cited its Instagram, a Canva landing page, or even its UberEats menu. It will find something. The question is whether you control what it finds.

Finding 2 — Dish-level queries are winner-take-all, and text menus win them.

In our five dish-specific prompts the pattern was brutal. Asked where to get burrata pizza in South Miami, the AI picked one family pizzeria in South Miami, quoted its menu line verbatim — toppings and the $17.50 price — and explicitly dismissed two better-known competitors with the phrase "burrata pizza isn't listed as a specific dish."

Read that again: restaurants likely serving comparable pizza were eliminated because the dish wasn't named as text anywhere the AI could read. The same pattern held for ropa vieja, lomo saltado, and croquetas — every winner had the dish written out, with a name and usually a price, on a crawlable page. A PDF menu is invisible here. 36 of our 50 answers referenced specific dishes in their reasoning; dish text is not a nice-to-have, it's the raw material AI recommendations are made of.

Finding 3 — One local blog can decide an entire answer.

For "business lunch in downtown Miami," nearly the whole answer was built on a single local food blog. For "romantic dinner in Coral Gables," one neighborhood magazine drove the recommendation set. National authority (Michelin, Yelp lists) got mentioned as social proof, but small local publications were the load-bearing sources.

For an independent restaurant this is good news: you don't need Eater — though Eater owned the "best new restaurants" query — you need the three or four blogs and neighborhood magazines that cover your area. One inclusion there can put you in thousands of AI answers.

Finding 4 — Spanish queries get English sources. Mostly.

We expected Spanish prompts to surface a parallel Spanish-language web. They didn't: the AI answered in Spanish but cited the same English-language restaurant sites, Yelp and OpenTable pages, translating on the fly. Spanish-language travel sites appeared only at the margins. Practical read for Miami restaurants: an English text menu is the foundation even for Spanish-speaking discovery — but the few ES-language sources that do get cited have very little competition.

Finding 5 — Intent changes the source mix, predictably.

"Cheap eats" and "where do locals actually eat" pulled Reddit, Yelp and Instagram. "Best new restaurants" pulled Eater and Resy almost exclusively. Amenity queries — dog friendly, gluten free, live music — pulled restaurant pages that state the policy or schedule explicitly, plus niche directories like Find Me Gluten Free. The AI doesn't infer that you're dog friendly; it looks for a sentence that says so.

What to do about it (the checklist)

  • Put your menu on a real page as text — every dish named, described, priced. This is the highest-leverage hour a restaurant can spend on AI visibility.
  • Own your domain and keep it. We watched a restaurant get represented by its ordering-platform page because its brand domain was lost. The AI works with whatever URL the web associates with you.
  • Write the boring sentences. "We have a dog friendly patio." "Live jazz on Fridays." "Gluten free pasta available." Each one is a query you currently can't win.
  • Court your neighborhood blog, not just the big guides. One local inclusion outweighs ten directory listings.
  • Keep ratings healthy and recent — they're still the ranking layer underneath everything.

Boost My Spot is a boutique consultancy for Florida's independent restaurants. We run this exact audit — plus Google Business Profile, reviews, and multilingual presence — as a free five-page diagnostic, delivered in 48 hours. boostmyspot.com/audit

The full prompt list is in the appendix below.

Appendix: the 50 prompts

  1. Best Cuban restaurant in Little Havana
  2. Best Cuban food in Hialeah
  3. Authentic Italian restaurant in Coral Gables
  4. Best wood-fired pizza in South Miami
  5. Best Peruvian restaurant in Doral
  6. Middle Eastern restaurant in Aventura
  7. Best French bistro in Miami
  8. Best Colombian restaurant in Kendall
  9. Authentic Mexican tacos in Wynwood
  10. Best Argentinian steakhouse in Brickell
  11. Best Venezuelan arepas in Doral
  12. Haitian food in Little Haiti
  13. Best sushi in Coral Gables
  14. Best Spanish tapas in Miami
  15. Best Caribbean restaurant in Fort Lauderdale
  16. Best Italian restaurant in Boca Raton
  17. Best seafood restaurant in Key Biscayne
  18. Best Greek restaurant in Miami
  19. Best Brazilian steakhouse in Miami
  20. Best Thai restaurant in Miami Beach
  21. Where should I take a date in Coral Gables — romantic dinner
  22. Family friendly restaurant in Doral with parking
  23. Best brunch in Coconut Grove
  24. Late night food in Brickell after 11pm
  25. Quiet restaurant for a business lunch in downtown Miami
  26. Best restaurant for a birthday dinner in Miami under $50 per person
  27. Where to eat near Miami airport that isn't a chain
  28. Dog friendly restaurant with outdoor seating in Miami
  29. Best cheap eats in Little Havana
  30. Gluten free friendly restaurant Miami Beach
  31. Best vegan restaurant in Wynwood
  32. Where do locals actually eat in Miami, not tourist traps
  33. Best new restaurants in Miami 2026
  34. Best hole-in-the-wall restaurants Miami
  35. Restaurant with live music in Miami this weekend
  36. Mejor restaurante cubano en Miami
  37. Dónde comer ceviche en Doral
  38. Restaurante romántico en Coral Gables
  39. Mejor pizza en South Miami
  40. Dónde desayunar en la Pequeña Habana
  41. Restaurante para cumpleaños en Kendall
  42. Mejores arepas en Miami
  43. Restaurante familiar en Hialeah
  44. Dónde comer mariscos en Miami Beach
  45. Mejor parrilla argentina en Brickell
  46. Where can I get burrata pizza in South Miami
  47. Best ropa vieja in Miami
  48. Where to find lomo saltado in Doral
  49. Best croquetas in Coral Gables
  50. Where can I get fresh stone crab in Miami