My Restaurant Had 200 Google Reviews and No Way to Show Them. Here's What We Built.

For about three years, the most valuable thing my restaurant owned was invisible.

We had more than two hundred Google reviews. Four and a half stars. People wrote paragraphs — about the lamb, about the corner table, about the night we stayed open late for a birthday that ran long. I used to read them on slow afternoons. That was the marketing. That was the proof that we were good at this.

And I had absolutely no way to show it to anyone.

"Do you have a website?"

It happened constantly. Someone would find us, love it, and ask for a website to send a friend. And I would stand there with nothing to give them. A Google listing is not a website — it is a map pin, a phone number, and a wall of reviews that no first-time visitor ever scrolls through.

So I did what every small restaurant does. I got one of those link-in-bio tools and put it in our Instagram. A stack of buttons: Menu. Call. Directions. Technically a link. But it said nothing about us. It did not contain a single one of those two hundred reviews. The best thing we had — the actual words of people who loved the place — was locked inside Google, and the thing I was sending new customers was a grey list of buttons.

Building a real website was the obvious answer, and also impossible. Quotes came back in the thousands. The cheap route meant learning a website builder, choosing a template, and worst of all writing the copy — sitting down to describe my own restaurant in marketing language I do not have the time or the stomach for. So I never did it. For three years.

My brother looked at the problem differently

My brother Val builds software. One evening I was complaining about this again — the reviews, the buttons, the website I would never build — and he stopped me and said the thing that turned into favURL:

"You don't need to write a website. You already wrote it. Your customers wrote it. It's just in the wrong place."

That was the whole idea. The copy already existed. Two hundred people had already described, better than I ever could, why someone should come in. The problem was never a lack of words. It was that the words were trapped on Google, in a format nobody reads top to bottom.

So he built a small thing that read all of our reviews, found the themes — the dishes people named, the service they remembered, the reasons they came back — and turned them into a single clean page. Not a template I had to fill in. A page generated from what was already true about us.

Seeing the page go live

I will be honest about the moment it clicked. He sent me a link, I opened it on my phone, and there it was: a headline about the experience of eating with us, the dishes our regulars rave about, real quotes from real reviews, our hours, our photos, a clean URL I could actually say out loud. It took about a minute to generate. It read like us — because every word came from people who had actually been there.

I put it in our Instagram bio that night. I printed a little QR code for the counter. When someone asked for a website now, I had one. Not a list of buttons — a page that did the convincing for me.

Why we kept going

We figured if this was the gap for my restaurant, it was the gap for every small business sitting on a pile of reviews with nowhere to put them. The barber with the loyal chair. The café someone drives across town for. The mechanic everyone calls honest. All of them have the same problem I had: the best marketing already written, in the wrong place.

So favURL became a real thing. You search your business, it reads your Google reviews, and it builds you a page in about a minute. It is free — the page never expires — because the version of this I needed three years ago should have been free too.

If you have reviews and no website, you are exactly who we built this for. It takes a minute, it costs nothing, and you might feel the same small relief I did the first time I had something real to send.

Generate your restaurant's page free → · or see how it works for restaurants and coffee shops.