Citations

A citation is any place on the web that lists your restaurant's NAP — Yelp, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing Places, Foursquare, OpenTable, and dozens of smaller local directories. Citations are one of Google's oldest signals for verifying that a business is real and well-established.

Citations come in two flavors: structured (a directory listing with proper Name, Address, Phone fields) and unstructured (a blog mention, a news article, a "best of" list that names you). Both count, but structured ones are easier to build and audit.

The number of citations matters less than their consistency and quality. Twenty accurate citations on relevant directories beat two hundred random ones with mismatched details. The big-leverage sites are the same handful for every restaurant: Google, Apple Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Bing, plus any well-trafficked local guide ("Eater" in major cities, regional newspapers, neighborhood blogs).

Citation building is mostly about coverage and cleanup, not creation. Most restaurants already exist on the major directories — the work is finding all the listings, fixing inconsistencies, and filling in missing fields like cuisine type, hours, and a real photo.

Citations feed prominence signals — they tell Google that other independent sources agree your business is real and where you say it is. For a new restaurant, claiming and completing citations is one of the first things to do. For an existing one, auditing them for NAP consistency is one of the highest-ROI cleanup tasks.