A recommendation is a yes or a no
from somebody nobody checked.
Facebook does not run stars the way the review sites do. A Page rating is assembled from recommendations, only the public ones count, and Meta says it does not verify that the person recommending you ever ate anything. For a restaurant with a delivery arm, that last part is the whole story.
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Where the number on your Page comes from
Meta documents each of these. The first one explains most of the strange reviews a kitchen gets, and the last one is the button not to press.
Meta says it does not verify that somebody reviewing or recommending a Page bought anything or used the service.
A delivery order that a courier dropped, a party somebody heard about, a wrong branch: all of them can land on the Page, and none of them can be disproved from your side.
The Page rating is built from the reviews and recommendations people share about the Page, rather than from a star a diner picks.
There is no half star to defend. A recommendation is binary, so a mediocre night is either a yes or a no, and the wording underneath is where the nuance goes.
No rating shows on a Page until at least five reviews have landed, and only publicly shared recommendations are counted in it.
A new room's Page is not failing, it is under the floor. And a glowing recommendation shared with friends only is genuinely invisible to the number.
Turning Recommendations off disables them and removes the rating and the reviews from the Page.
It is the only off switch on this list, and it deletes the evidence of every good night alongside the bad one you wanted gone.
Answering the review of a meal nobody served
Every restaurant with delivery gets these: a cold order, a missing side, an address on the other side of town. The complaint is real to the person writing it and the kitchen may have had nothing to do with it, which makes the reply harder than it looks.
Correct, and it reads as a shrug
That order went out with a third party courier, so the delay was not on our end. We package everything properly when it leaves the kitchen. You will need to take it up with the delivery app.
Same facts, and somebody takes it on
Cold noodles are a bad dinner however they got that way, and I am sorry. That one travelled with a courier we do not control, but we have switched the containers on the noodle dishes and started sealing the lids. Message the Page and I will sort your order out.
The second reply keeps every fact of the first and stops the reader deciding you are the sort of place that argues. On a Page where nobody verifies who ordered what, arguing about who was at fault is a fight with no referee and an audience.
Where the rest of your reviews are
A Facebook Page usually sits alongside the search listing, at least one review site and the delivery apps. Every one we connect drops into the same inbox with a draft attached.
- Yelp
- TripAdvisor
- DoorDash
- Trustpilot
- Etsy
- Square
Facebook questions from kitchens
Delivery makes most of these harder than they should be.
Somebody reviewed us who never ordered from us. Options?
Meta says it does not verify that a reviewer used the service, so there is no receipt to produce. Reply calmly and factually for the benefit of the next reader, and report the content separately if it breaks Meta's rules. Arguing in the thread is the one move that reliably makes it worse.
Our Page shows no rating at all. Is it broken?
A Page does not display a rating until at least five reviews have landed on it. Below that there is nothing to show, so the fix is time and volume rather than a setting. It is worth knowing before somebody spends an afternoon in Page settings.
A regular says they recommended us but we cannot see it.
Only publicly shared recommendations are included in a Page's rating, and one shared with a narrower audience is visible only to that audience. They did leave it. It just is not part of the number, and there is nothing for you to fix.
Should we turn Recommendations off after a bad week?
Meta says turning them off removes the rating and the reviews from the Page. Every good night you have banked goes with the bad one, and a Page with no reviews reads worse to somebody choosing dinner than a mixed one does. It is a very visible thing to have switched off.
Does GetSetReply post to the Page for us?
No. We draft, you post. Drafts arrive written against the review, you change whatever does not sound like you, and you send it. Nothing is published on your behalf.
Reviews and restaurants, elsewhere on this site
For restaurants
Replies for the reviews you did not see coming
Drafted for each review as it arrives, and left for you to read and post.