Introducing second-party sources

Previously, we wrote about how we’re relying more on first-party sources for accuracy: the restaurant’s own website, menu, or published policy.

We’ve now finished doing that for the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle metros, and one thing stood out. A lot of restaurants still have no fees reported. As of October 4, that’s 8,280 of the 9,219 restaurants in the Bay Area, and 2,905 of the 3,227 in Seattle: about 90% in both, shown in gray below.

That isn’t because they don’t charge any. Their websites just don’t mention them. From word of mouth and our own manual research, we know many of these places do have mandatory fees that only show up on the check.

So we’re introducing second-party sources, to cover more restaurants and more of the fees and tipping policies they actually have.

What’s changing

To start, second-party sources means the main platforms where diners already talk about this: Google reviews, Yelp reviews, and Reddit.

Each restaurant’s source now comes with a tag showing which kind it is, so it’s always clear whether a fee came from the restaurant itself or from someone describing it:

First partyFrom the restaurant
Second partyFrom reviews or public reporting

You can also filter search results by source type, to see only restaurants backed by first-party sources, or only second-party.

This is new, so only a few restaurants have second-party sources so far. It’ll take some time to work through the rest.

Second-party sources also aren’t necessarily up to date. A review reflects what someone saw when they wrote it, and the restaurant may have changed its policy since. So there’s a new field for the source date: when that review or post was written, even if we only added it today. A fee from a 2026 review and one from a 2021 review shouldn’t look the same.

First-party still comes first

Even with second-party sources added, first-party sourcing is still our primary source of truth. We check the restaurant’s own website, menu, and policies first, and only look to reviews and Reddit when the restaurant doesn’t say anything itself.