GrubHub Is Being Accused of Building Fake Restaurant Websites

Food delivery service GrubHub has been creating websites for its client restaurants, with those restaurants seeing an increased commission fee as a result, according to a report from New Food Economy.

New Food Economy’s report says that GrubHub, along with its subsidiary Seamless, bought over 23,000 domains of restaurant names, with a good deal of those being variations of the same restaurant. Some restaurants’ websites were actually in direct Google competition with their own shadow sites.

Restaurant owners who provided testimonies to New Food Economy say that GrubHub’s shadow websites negatively impacted the institutions they were mimicking. By having these sites, GrubHub had customers believe they were ordering directly from the restaurant–and customers did still get their food–but also it would come with a commission fee cost to the eatery because the sites weren’t officially affiliated with them.

Additionally, phone numbers listed on GrubHub’s website will lead to the restaurants, but technology utilized by the food delivery service would allegedly flag the calls as an order, which also led to a commission fee for them.

A lawsuit was recently filed by a restaurant owner in Philadelphia alleges that Grubhub has been charging fees for calls where no order was placed and were just simply inquiries.