An AI Overview is not a new index. It is a summary of pages Google already decided to rank, blended with the structured facts Google already holds about your business. That is worth internalizing before you spend money on anything, because it means there is no separate channel to optimize and no submission process to find.
What changes is the unit of selection. Traditional ranking picks pages. A summary picks passages. A page can rank perfectly well and contribute nothing to an overview because no sentence on it answers a question cleanly, and that gap is most of what a restaurant can actually act on.
Two different question shapes, two different sources
Watch which queries produce an overview and which produce the map results, because they draw on different material.
"Where should I eat near me" and "best Thai food in Portland" mostly produce local results, the map pack, and profile cards. Those are driven by your Google Business Profile, your proximity to the searcher, your reviews, and your categories. A summary may sit above them, and when it does, it is usually assembled from local guides and roundups rather than from restaurant websites.
"Does Mario's have gluten free pizza", "what time does Mario's close on Sunday", "is there parking at Mario's" produce something closer to a direct answer, and those pull from your own pages and your profile. This is the half you control almost completely, and it is the half most restaurants have never written down anywhere.
Split your effort accordingly. The first shape is a long local marketing project. The second is an afternoon of writing plain sentences.
Your Business Profile is the record that overrules your website
If your profile says you close at 9 and your site says 10, one of those is going to end up in an answer and you do not get to choose which.
For local restaurant queries the profile is frequently the most trusted record Google holds, so treat it as your source of truth and make everything else match it. Claim it if you have not. Set your regular hours, then set holiday hours before each holiday rather than after somebody shows up to a dark room. Get your categories right, primary and secondary. Fill in whether you offer dine-in, takeout, delivery and curbside, because those attributes get read directly into answers about you.
Then check the fields you have never looked at. Price range, service options, accessibility, whether you take reservations. Blank fields do not stay blank in an answer; they get filled by inference from somewhere else, and inference is where wrong descriptions come from.
If you run more than one location, this multiplies, and the failure mode is one profile drifting while the others stay current. The mechanics of keeping a set of them straight are in multi-location local SEO.
Write passages that can be lifted whole
The mechanical thing that gets a sentence of yours into a summary is that the sentence answers a question by itself, without the surrounding paragraph.
Compare two versions of the same fact. "We're proud to offer a range of options for guests with dietary needs, crafted with care by our kitchen team." Versus: "We have gluten-free pizza crust, available on any pizza for two dollars more." The second one is quotable, checkable, and useful. The first one says nothing a system can repeat.
Apply that to the fifteen or twenty questions your phone gets every week. Parking. Delivery radius. Whether you take reservations and for what party size. Whether you have a patio, high chairs, a private room, vegan options, corkage. Each one gets a heading phrased as the question and one to three sentences underneath that answer it plainly. Marking those up with FAQ structured data makes them easier to parse, though the plain text is doing most of the work.
Your menu deserves the same treatment. Item names, descriptions and prices as text on a page, not a PDF and not a photograph of a printed menu. A summarizer cannot answer a question about a dish it cannot read, and menu questions are a large share of what people ask about restaurants. The full version of that argument is in menu page SEO.
Contradictions are worse than gaps
An operator's instinct on seeing a wrong answer is to publish more. Usually the correct move is to delete or correct something.
A summarizer that finds your hours stated three different ways across your site, your profile and a directory has to resolve the conflict, and it may resolve it wrong. Adding a fourth statement does not help. Making the other three agree does.
So run a small audit. Write down your hours, address, phone number, delivery area, and whether you take reservations. Then check that exact set against your website, your Business Profile, and the three or four directories that show up when you search your own name. Fix every disagreement at its source. This is tedious, and it fixes more wrong answers than any content you could write in the same amount of time. It is also the same audit that improves how restaurants show up in AI search generally, and the one that keeps near-me and voice searches from sending people to a closed door.
Pay particular attention to old phone numbers. A number from a system you replaced can persist in listings for years, and a customer who dials it does not call back on the right one. They order somewhere else.
Measure this in calls and orders, not traffic
Sessions to your website will probably decline for informational queries, because the answer now appears without a click. Publishers have real cause to be upset about that. You mostly do not.
Nobody was going to become a regular by reading your parking paragraph. The searches that matter to your business end in a phone call, a direction request, a delivery order, or a table. A summary that correctly tells someone you are open until 10 and take walk-ins has done your marketing for you at zero cost, even though it cost you a page view.
So watch the numbers that reflect that: calls, direction requests, orders through whatever channel you use, and covers. If those hold or grow while sessions fall, the change is working in your favor and your analytics dashboard is telling you a misleading story.
The one-hour version
If you do nothing else: claim and complete your Business Profile, set holiday hours for the next six months, put your menu on a page as text, and add ten question-shaped headings answering what people actually call to ask. Then search your own restaurant name and read every fact in the results against your list.
The restaurants that get described accurately are not the ones doing anything clever. They are the ones where somebody sat down once and made all the copies of the truth agree.