New Icon Appearing in the Map Pack & Local Finder: 'On the menu'

[Brodie Clark]

Looks like there's a new icon showing in the map pack and local finder called 'on the menu'. Couldn't find any obvious consistencies for how this is triggered yet. Did find one example with the query "kebab" which showed for a business that definitely doesn't sell kebabs.

Initial thoughts were that it was similar to the 'sold here' feature, but I couldn't trigger a related question on any of the listings that had the icon appearing. Will keep testing and update my article when we know for sure: What do the symbols mean in Google’s Map Pack and Local Finder? - Search Engine Land

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Brodie Clark, nice find. It appears to be triggered by having menu that's pulled into the knowledge panel. In the example you showed, this menu mentions falafel, even though that page is one hop from the page that restaurant's "Menu" link points to.

The menu is usually on a third-party site (e.g. allmenus), but doesn't need to be. Burger King, for instance, has its own menu page pulled into its knowledge panel, and that page produces "On the menu: ___" snippets for certain search terms. So you can set up a page that gets you those snippets.

I'm also seeing it only for restaurants so far, but I think that's only because mostly restaurants have a menu pulled into their KP. I've seen it for non-dining businesses in the past, and wish I had an example off the top of my head.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I knew this looked familiar and started digging around to see where I first saw it. Tom Waddington pointed out that we actually tweeted about it last year:



It got brought up on our G+ group (which is obviously now closed - we launched a Facebook group instead).

 

[Brodie Clark]

Oh wow - that's very old then

Surprised I haven't noticed it until now. Will update our blog at some stage with that info