A guide for pubs, bars and restaurants — how to write up your happy hours and food specials so people can find them.
What’s changed
Getting people to your happy hour and your food specials used to mean being somewhere in a list of links. People searched, they scrolled, they clicked through to your website. Now they often get an answer instead — from Google, or from an assistant like ChatGPT — without opening anybody’s website at all.
“Where’s happy hour in Manly tonight?”
“Cheap steak night near me on a Tuesday”
“Bottomless brunch, walking distance, under $80”
Your website still matters. What has changed is that a good-looking page now counts for less than a clearly written one, because those answers are built out of words rather than design.
Worth knowing where you stand before you change anything: open ChatGPT or Google and ask for the happy hours in your suburb. If your venue is missing, the ten things below are the usual reasons.
Write it so it can be quoted
When somebody asks where the good deals are, the answer gets put together from what is written down. The clearer your offer is on the page, the better the chance it comes back with your price, your times and your venue’s name on it.
1
Write it as text, not a picture
2
Claim your Google Business Profile
3
Say exactly what the deal is
4
Say exactly when it’s on
5
Put the details in plain view
6
Take down what’s finished
7
Fill in your website’s date and time fields
8
Keep your web addresses simple and stable
9
If you run more than one venue
10
Check you are not blocking AI search
1
Write it as text, not a picture
Type your specials onto the page as words.
Text inside a picture can be picked up these days, but it carries much less weight than words typed on the page, and it is not usually what an answer gets built from. Keep the poster. Add the words underneath it.
A quick check: if you cannot select the words with your cursor, your offer is going to be harder to find.
Good example
Happy Hour
Every Monday to Friday, 4pm – 6pm
$8 schooners · $9 house wine · $12 house spirits
Common mistakes
The whole specials page is a poster or a flyer image
The menu is a PDF and the offer is written nowhere else. PDFs can be read, but a page of plain text is read more reliably and quoted far more easily
The specials only appear in a pop-up over the page
The offer is a photo of the chalkboard
2
Claim your Google Business Profile
Fill in your Google Business Profile, and post to it.
For anyone searching nearby, Google usually answers with the map and a few listings before any website appears. That listing also feeds the answers people get when they ask an assistant where to go. It is free, and the same things matter there as on your own site: real days, real times, real prices.
Two things carry more weight here than most owners expect. Posting your happy hour as an Offer, with a real finish time, and re-posting it, keeps the listing looking current. And reviews count — both the rating and how many you have, and how recent they are. A steady trickle of recent ones does more than a good score from three years ago.
Good example
Your happy hour posted as an Offer, with hours and menu filled in:
Happy Hour
Monday to Friday, 4pm – 6pm
$8 schooners · $9 house wine
Common mistakes
The listing has never been claimed
Opening hours out of date, or no special hours set for public holidays — so the listing says you are open when you are shut
Nothing posted for months, so the listing reads as abandoned
Never asking for a review, and never replying to the ones you get
The venue’s name written differently in the two places — “The Royal” on your website, “Royal Hotel Manly” on the listing
3
Say exactly what the deal is
Name the offer and name a price.
Vague wording leaves an answer with nothing to quote, and leaves a customer with nothing to compare.
Good example
Happy Hour
$8 schooners · $9 house wine · $12 house spirits
Steak Night
$25 rump with chips and salad (normally $34)
Common mistakes
“Great value drinks”, “amazing specials” — nothing to compare
“$30 lunches” with nothing marking it as a special, so it reads as your normal price
“Specials” or “What’s On” as the only wording — a heading rather than an offer
A discount with no detail. Say “half price”, “2-for-1”, “no corkage”
4
Say exactly when it’s on
Days, times, and for a one-off, the full date including the year.
Good example
Steak Night
Every Tuesday, 5pm – 9pm
Melbourne Cup Lunch
Tuesday 3 November 2026, from 11.30am
Common mistakes
No day at all. “Bookings from 2pm” is a time, not a day — and it is the commonest reason a real offer gets left out
“SAT 8 JULY” — which July? With no year it is hard to work out whether that is next week or two years ago, so it tends to get treated as uncertain
“This Wednesday” is true for six days. “Every Wednesday” stays true until you change it
“All winter” — which winter? “Until 31 August 2026” is safer
“Afternoons” instead of a start and a finish time
5
Put the details in plain view
Put the day, time and price on the page that lists your specials, rather than one click deeper.
A page of teasers is hard for anyone to scan. If someone has to open five pages to compare five deals, most will not bother.
There is a second reason, and it is less obvious. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot — the readers behind the assistants people ask — do not run the code that loads a page’s extras. Googlebot is the only major one that does. So a slider, a booking widget or a “load more” button can look perfectly fine to you and to Google, and be missing entirely from what an assistant sees.
It is worth knowing how lopsided this gets. Some sites serve millions of characters where only a few thousand are the actual content. The offer is in there, drowned out by everything around it.
Good example
One What’s On page listing every current offer in full:
WHAT’S ON
Happy Hour — every Monday to Friday, 4pm–6pm
$8 schooners · $9 house wine · $12 house spirits
Steak Night — every Tuesday, 5pm–9pm
$25 rump with chips and salad (normally $34)
Parmi Wednesday — every Wednesday, 5pm–9pm
$20 chicken parmigiana
Separate pages for each offer are optional. If you have them, keep the details on the listing page too.
Common mistakes
A list of offer names and “Find out more” links, with every detail one level down
Details only inside a photo gallery you click a thumbnail to open
Offers in a slider or carousel that shows one at a time
A booking widget holding the only copy of the times and prices
6
Take down what’s finished
Remove past events and old promotions rather than only hiding them.
Many websites keep old entries inside the page after they stop showing them. A page displaying four current offers can be carrying forty finished ones underneath. The more of that there is, the harder it becomes for what is current to stand out — to a reader, and to anything putting an answer together. And last Christmas’s menu can end up read as something you are running now.
Good example
Your What’s On page lists only what is on. Anything finished is deleted, or moved to a separate archive page.
Common mistakes
A “What’s On” page where most entries have already happened
Last year’s Christmas trading hours still listed
A “current menu” dated two years ago
Old social posts kept in a gallery on the page
7
Fill in your website’s date and time fields
Fill in the date, time and location fields your website gives you, and put the schedule in the description as well.
Most website builders publish those fields in a tidy format built to be read automatically. A description written in prose is not part of that, which is why the fields are worth filling in properly. It is the difference between something guessing your happy hour is on Wednesdays and something knowing it.
There is a catch worth knowing about. Many builders only offer an “event”, and an event needs a date — but a weekly special does not have one. The usual way round it is to set a date far in the future so the event never drops off the list. That works on screen, and it leaves the page saying two things at once: the words say every Wednesday, the date says November 2026.
The description is your safety net. Write the real schedule there in words too, so it holds up whatever the date field ends up saying. Print the year while you are there — most of these tools show only the day and the month.
Good example
Whatever the date field says, the description carries the truth:
Runs every Wednesday, 4pm – 6pm. Ongoing.
One night only — Tuesday 3 November 2026.
Common mistakes
Everything typed into the description with the date and time fields left empty
A weekly special dated years ahead, with nothing in the words saying it repeats
An event whose only date reads “8 JULY”, with no year written anywhere
Finished events sitting in a list headed “Upcoming”
8
Keep your web addresses simple and stable
Give your specials one address and keep it.
The wording of an address matters less than people think. What matters is that it keeps working — an address that expires or changes loses every link anyone has saved or shared. Pick something plain and consistent and leave it alone.
Good example
/whats-on is a common choice and easy for anyone to understand:
A date in the address — /event/happy-hour/2026-01-17. That address stops working once the date passes, taking the page and anyone’s saved link with it
A brand new address every time you update the offer
Two spellings of the same section — /whats-on in one place, /whatson in another
Long tracking codes left on the address you publish
9
If you run more than one venue
Give each venue its own section of the site, name the venue on every offer, and write that name identically everywhere.
When several venues share a website, offers get credited to the wrong one. It is hard to get right from the outside: venues in the same group usually share a name, and sometimes a suburb as well, so where the offer sits on the site is often the only reliable signal.
Exactness matters more than it should. A missing space, an extra one, or an ampersand where you used “and” is enough for the same venue to be read as two different businesses.
Good example
Each venue’s page carries its own offers, and each offer names its venue:
$8.50 pints & house wine — every weekday 4–6pm, Manly only
Common mistakes
One What’s On page covering the whole group, with the venue named only in small print
A venue with no page of its own, reachable only through a group-wide events index
An offer that runs at one venue listed on a page covering all of them
The name written with a space in one place and without it in another, or shortened on the booking page
A group index mixing the venues in with everything else the business does
10
Check you are not blocking AI search
Ask whoever looks after your website whether AI search assistants are allowed to read it.
Two settings can turn them away, and neither shows from the front of the site. One is a small file telling automated visitors what they may read. The other is security software that stops them before they get that far.
There are two kinds worth knowing about: the ones collecting material to train on, and the ones fetching your page to answer a question somebody is asking right now. Whether you allow the first is your call. Most venues have no particular reason to block either — the thing to avoid is turning away the second by accident, which happens easily because the two often get blocked together in one line.
Good example
One question, for whoever runs your site:
“Are we allowing AI search assistants to read the site,
and does our security software let them through?”
Common mistakes
Blocking every automated visitor at once to keep the training ones out
Security settings that turn them away regardless of what the site allows
Assuming that because the page looks fine to you, everything can reach it
If you remember one thing
A plain sentence beats a beautiful poster.
Say what, when and how much — in plain text, all on one page.