The great restaurant that AI could not see
An award-winning Edinburgh restaurant went from #22 to #9 in AI recommendations in one quarter.
Up 13 places among 29 indian restaurants. We'd promised Arun a Top 10 spot back in April. #9 clears it, and lands in the top third of the field.
Ask an AI assistant where to eat and you get three or four names, not ten blue links to sift through. The same restaurants come up over and over; everywhere else may as well not exist. How often a brand turns up in those answers, and how near the top, is what we call its AI visibility. On Google you can at least linger on page two. There is no page two in an AI answer. You're named, or you're nowhere.
Prahna is an independent restaurant in Corstorphine, on the western edge of Edinburgh. The Asian Catering Federation named it Scotland's Best Asian Restaurant, and it holds a Tripadvisor Travellers' Choice 2025. People who ate there came back. But ask an assistant for Indian food in Edinburgh and Prahna rarely came up. In April it sat 22nd of 29. On the rare occasions the models did mention it, they were warm about it. Mostly they just didn't.
The problem was never reputation. The assistants simply couldn't read the place. Its menus lived in PDFs, which AI barely parses. About 15% of the mentions it did get spelled the name “Prana”, so even that recognition was split in two. On Google's AI Overviews it was almost nowhere. So we rebuilt theprahna.co.uk for machines to read, and three months later it was #9, inside the top 10 assistants pick from.
“If a machine cannot read it, a machine cannot recommend it.”
April — before
- Ranked #22 of 29 — a “Cult Favourite”, rarely surfaced
- Nearly absent from Google AI Overviews
- ~15% of mentions misspelled the name as “Prana”
- Menus locked in PDFs — a format AI reads poorly
- “High or nothing”: 55.6% top choice, 0% mid, 44.4% buried
June — after
- Ranked #9 — into the top 10 AI recommends from
- Appears across all four AI surfaces: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini
- One consistent name everywhere — the “Prana” misread has no foothold
- 256 dishes on structured, crawlable web pages
- Reliable #3–4 placement when recommended, not a lucky spike
Where Prahna sits now
AI visibility across the Edinburgh Indian field, June — top of the field shown. The category leader and Prahna are named; other restaurants are anonymised. Rank is the measure we report.
Dishoom Edinburgh
The Prahna Indian GrillUp thirteen places since April, now ahead of restaurants that beat it three months ago.
Four structural issues, closed at the source
We didn't wait for AI to come around on its own. Every fix here answers something specific the April audit turned up.
Problem: Google AI Overviews invisibility
Made the site machine-legible and crawlable
Structured data across every page, AI crawlers explicitly allowed in robots.txt, soft-404s fixed for Google indexing, and all legacy URLs 301-redirected so no ranking signal was lost.
Problem: Zero comparison presence
Built intent pages and peer-framing content
Dedicated pages for the searches Prahna was losing — afternoon chai, brunch, Sunday lunch, parking, vegetarian — plus a press page and a community story that places Prahna alongside its peers.
Problem: 15% “Prana” hallucination
Fixed the brand-name signal
Canonical redirects for /prana and /pranha, one consistent name everywhere, and matching address & organisation schema (NAP consistency) so the misspelling had nowhere to take hold.
Problem: Menus locked in PDFs
Rebuilt every menu as a web page
Six menus moved off PDF, 256 dishes individually marked up so AI can read each one, and the old PDF links 301-redirected to the new pages.
Not luck — the work
AI now cites the pages we built
The new FAQ page shows up word-for-word in the June audit's citations. It didn't exist in April. The models are quoting content we wrote for them.
theprahna.co.uk is now a source AI trusts
The site's own pages, which we'd flagged as the biggest opportunity, now turn up as citations. The models are reading theprahna.co.uk directly.
Coverage across every model
In April Prahna showed up on some models and barely on Google. Now it's on all four surfaces in the study, not just lucky in one corner of one.
Photo: The ScotsmanQuick to respond, easy to communicate with, and delivered everything they promised on time. Since we started working together, we've noticed more customers coming to Prahna. One of the biggest differences has been during the summer months. In previous years, we didn't see many visitors from outside the area, but this summer we've had noticeably more non-local customers finding and visiting our restaurant.
Arun Ramanan
Owner, The Prahna Indian Grill · Edinburgh
Read the whole thing
The full report: how we ran the audit, what we rebuilt, and where Prahna ended up. Free to read, no email.
