An independent, edition-based record of how major AI assistants recommend restaurants.
As millions of people begin asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity where to eat, AI assistants are becoming a new layer of restaurant discovery. Their recommendations are where many diners first encounter restaurant options — a pattern that, at scale, may shape which restaurants receive initial attention, though the downstream effects on dining behavior have not been separately measured.
The AI Scene does not review restaurants. We study how AI systems describe, compare, and recommend them — and we publish what we find.
Each edition of The AI Scene covers a single city and dining category. Every edition contains two sections:
Restaurant Index — a ranked list of the top 50 restaurants by total AI mention count, with a per-platform breakdown showing how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cover each restaurant individually.
What the Machines Said — editorial analysis of the patterns in the data: where the platforms agree, where they diverge, which restaurants are consistently overlooked, and what the recommendation behavior reveals about each platform's priorities.
Those patterns document what a new generation of diners encounters when they ask AI where to eat.
The AI Scene measures recommendation behavior — not restaurant quality.
Each edition examines questions such as:
Mention frequency should not be interpreted as a quality ranking. A higher number of mentions means a restaurant appears more frequently within our research framework — not that it is objectively better than another.
Each edition analyzes a consistent set of restaurant discovery questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Rather than relying on a single prompt or isolated conversation, we evaluate recommendation patterns across multiple dining scenarios, including anniversaries, tasting menus, business dinners, neighborhood restaurants, and other real-world consumer intents. Every edition uses the same prompt framework across all platforms, allowing meaningful comparisons across models and over time.
Our research combines four complementary methods:
A consistent prompt framework executed across all supported AI platforms during a defined collection period.
Where supported, we compare responses generated primarily from a model's learned knowledge with responses augmented by live web retrieval. This distinction matters because different retrieval methods can produce meaningfully different restaurant recommendations.
We analyze the expanded searches AI generates during the recommendation process to understand which sources and entities are shaping the final output.
Every edition is reviewed by an experienced hospitality professional to distinguish meaningful patterns from statistical noise and provide context that raw data alone cannot.
Each edition of The AI Scene represents a documented snapshot of AI recommendation behavior during a specific collection period — not a permanent ranking. Every edition is dated so readers can understand when the research was conducted.
Mention frequency should not be interpreted as a quality ranking. A higher mention count means a restaurant appears more frequently within our research framework — not that it is objectively better than another.
The AI Scene is published by Ally Kiel, an AI discoverability strategist specializing in hospitality and premium food and beverage brands.
Before focusing on AI visibility, Ally spent more than a decade working across fine dining, wine, and premium food and beverage — including Michelin-starred restaurants, Napa Valley wineries, and luxury hospitality experiences — before moving into enterprise technology.
That combination of hospitality expertise and AI research shapes The AI Scene's editorial approach. The goal isn't simply to document what AI says about restaurants, but to understand where those recommendations reflect reality, where they fall short, and what those patterns reveal about the future of restaurant discovery.
For research inquiries — or to understand what AI is currently saying about your restaurant — visit allykielconsulting.com.