Setup guide · about 10 minutes
Put your menu on your Google listing
Your Google Business Profile has a field for a menu link. Most restaurants leave it empty, which means the single most common search anyone runs about a restaurant — its name plus the word menu — lands on a listing that cannot answer it.
Why bother
Two reasons, and we are going to be precise about which one we can stand behind.
The one we are certain of: it puts your menu one tap from your listing. The listing is where a large share of “[restaurant] menu” searches actually end up — the profile panel is what Google shows first for a local business — and a profile with a menu link gets a Menu tab that a profile without one does not. A guest who cannot find prices in ten seconds goes to a third-party aggregator whose copy of your menu is out of date, or to whoever is open next door.
The one we are not going to overstate: it is also a link to your menu page from a page Google itself hosts about your business. We are not going to tell you what that is worth in rankings, because we do not know and neither does anyone quoting you a number for it. Treat the ranking effect as unknown and do it for the first reason.
Get the URL first
Half of the failures in this procedure are a wrong URL on the clipboard. Build it here.
Type your restaurant name — or paste the slug shown in the QR studio — and copy the finished URL. This is the address to paste into Google, not the one in your browser bar while you are signed in.
https://marji.co/m/your-restaurant
That is the pattern, with a placeholder in it. Fill the field above before you paste it anywhere.
No menu yet? A hosted menu page, a QR code and printable table tents are free forever — start here. It takes about fifteen minutes from a photo of your paper menu.
The six steps
Publish the menu and copy its public address
In the QR studio, publish the menu, then copy its public address — it looks like marji.co/m/your-restaurant. Use that address, not the URL in your browser while you are signed in to Marji.
The two get confused constantly. Anything under /app is your dashboard and asks a stranger to log in; /m/your-restaurant is the page a diner sees. Paste the wrong one into Google and the menu link opens a sign-in screen for everybody who taps it.
Open your Google Business Profile as an owner or manager
Sign in to the Google account that manages the listing, then search your restaurant's name on Google or find it in Maps. When you are signed in as an owner, your own profile appears with an editing panel above the public listing.
Google retired the separate business.google.com dashboard for most single-location businesses; editing now happens on the listing itself. If you see the public view with no editing controls, you are signed in to the wrong account — that is the usual cause, not a broken profile.
The profile also has to be verified. An unverified listing can be edited but the edits do not go live.
Open Edit profile and find the menu link field
Choose Edit profile, then look for the field labelled Menu link. Google has moved it between tabs more than once, so search the editor for the word menu rather than following a screenshot from an old blog post.
It sits alongside your website and ordering links rather than with your photos — the profile treats it as a contact detail, not as content.
Menu link, order-ahead links and reservation links are separate fields. Filling one does not fill the others, and the menu link is the one that produces a Menu tab on the listing.
Paste the URL and save
Paste the full address including https://. Save, and expect Google to review the change before it appears — edits to a profile are not always instant.
If the edit is rejected, the most common reason is a URL that redirects somewhere unexpected or a page that was not reachable when Google checked it. A published Marji menu is a plain public page, so re-check that the menu is actually published rather than sitting in draft.
Check it from a logged-out phone
Search your restaurant on a phone that is not signed in to your Google account and look for the Menu tab on your listing. Tap it and confirm it opens your menu, not a sign-in screen.
Checking while signed in as the owner shows you the editor's version of reality. The only test that counts is the one a stranger runs.
Re-check after any change to your menu address
The link is a pointer, not a copy. Change your menu's slug and the Google link breaks silently — nobody reports a dead menu link, they just leave.
Prices and dishes are safe to change as often as you like: the address stays the same and Google keeps pointing at it. It is only the address itself that needs re-pasting.
If there is no menu link field
The field is tied to what Google thinks your business is. It appears for food-and-drink categories and not for others, so a listing whose primary category is something adjacent — a caterer, an event venue, a grocer with a kitchen — often has no menu link field at all. Work through these in order:
- Check your primary category. Not the additional ones — the primary. If it does not describe a place that serves food, change it to the one that does and re-open the editor. This is the fix in most cases, and it is worth getting right independently: the primary category is what your listing is matched against.
- Confirm the profile is verified. Unverified listings expose a reduced set of fields.
- Try the other surface. The editor is reachable from both Google Search and Google Maps, and the two have not always exposed the same fields at the same time. If one is missing it, open the other.
- Fall back to the website field. If there is genuinely no menu link field for your category, put the menu URL in the website field — assuming you do not have a separate site that needs to live there. A menu page is a better landing than nothing.
- Post the link. A profile post with the menu URL is not the same as the menu link field and does not create a Menu tab, but it is visible on the listing and it costs a minute.
One honest warning
Google changes this interface. Field names move between tabs, the editor gets rebuilt, and screenshots go stale within a year — which is why there are none on this page. What has stayed constant is the thing you are looking for: a field that takes a URL and is labelled with the word menu. Find that field, put a working public address in it, and check the result from a logged-out phone.
If the layout you are looking at does not match the steps above, trust the interface in front of you over this page and tell us — support@marji.co — so we can correct it.
The menu behind the link should never go stale.
The reason aggregator menus are wrong is that somebody has to retype them. A Marji menu is the same page at the same address forever: change a price in the app and the link on your Google listing is already showing it. The hosted menu, the QR code and the printable table tents are free.