Someone searches "trout amandine near me." You serve trout amandine. It's on your menu. Google shows your competitor instead. A blind guest opens your site, and their screen reader reads out a filename.
Why? Your menu is a PDF.
Google barely reads PDFs
Search engines index web pages — HTML text with structure. A PDF is a document file. Google can sometimes extract its text, but it treats it as a second-class citizen: no proper headings, no structured dish data, no fast mobile experience. Every dish on your menu is a phrase someone might search for, and a PDF throws almost all of that away.
An HTML menu does the opposite. Every dish name and description is indexable text on your own domain. "Bucatini all'amatriciana" becomes a page Google can rank. Multiply that by forty dishes and you've built real search surface area out of content you already have.
Phones hate PDFs too
Over half your guests will see your menu on a phone. A PDF on a phone means pinch-zooming a tiny two-column layout sideways, waiting for a file to download, and squinting. Most people give up. An HTML menu is just a page — it loads fast, fits the screen, and text scales to the size the guest has set on their phone.
Screen readers can't read it at all
This is the part that matters most. A blind guest's screen reader hits your PDF menu and gets nothing useful — often just the filename. Your menu, the single most important page on your site, is a wall. Under WCAG 2.2 AA, menu content needs to be real, structured text — which is also exactly what Google wants. Accessibility and SEO aren't two projects here. They're the same fix.
The fix
Put your menu on your site as HTML: dishes as text, sections as headings, prices as text. Keep a printable version if you like — but as the secondary copy, not the only copy.
This is how every Remi site works out of the box: the menu is structured HTML from day one, editable in minutes, accessible and indexable by default. Every dish is also published as schema.org Menu markup — name, description, price — so Google reads your menu as data, not just text, and screen readers read it as a menu, not a filename. See a real one: Volta's menu. And for the full picture of what an accessible restaurant site needs, the guide is here.