Google My Business has been displaying 3rd party menu links on listings since at least 2015. These links are added without the business’s permission and can only be removed if the business reaches out to the 3rd party site directly. In addition to menu links, GMB allows partners to publish Order ahead and Reservation URLs. Businesses can add their own links but cannot control which 3rd party menus are displayed within GMB.
Just this week, we noticed Google surfacing the partner links within the GMB dashboard. Previously, you could only see these when looking at your listing on search or maps. Now, when you view your listing in the GMB dashboard, Google will include any links you’ve loaded as well as a count of the number of partner links per section.
Upon clicking in to edit, you will see the partner links on your listing, and the ability to add your own links and mark a link as preferred by clicking the star next to it.
A great suggestion for businesses that have their own ordering, reservation, and menu services, is to add these links to your listing if they’re not already loaded and mark them as preferred.
It will be displayed to searchers like this:
If you don’t offer these services in-house, you can consider marking the 3rd-party link that gives you the best margins or provides the best ordering and delivery service as the preferred link.
In addition to adding the partner links in GMB, Google also added the ability for businesses to opt-out of Food Ordering.
Food Ordering by Google launched in May of 2019 and was automatically applied to listings. Unfortunately, this experience was not ideal for many restaurants who began to complain about Google’s Food Ordering feature.
In the past, in order to opt-out, you had to submit a request via a form. You can still leverage this if you want to remove a specific provider from the Food Ordering section.
Now, you can opt-out of the Food Ordering feature entirely within the GMB dashboard. Turning off Food Delivery will remove the blue ‘Order Delivery’ link on your listing. I did notice this took a while to update (a little over an hour).
If the button is still displayed after you opted out of Food Ordering, you will get the below response when the button is clicked. It will appear this way until the button is removed.
You can read more about the Food Ordering feature and how to opt-out on the Google My Business Help Center.
Both of these new features are only available to be edited manually within the dashboard. There is no bulk or API functionality currently.
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Source: localu
