Subcategory · AI Citation Index
Hospitality & Restaurants
The hospitality software market splits cleanly between restaurant-focused point-of-sale systems and property management platforms, with minimal overlap in buyer consideration. Toast's 50% shortlist rate establishes it as the default restaurant POS choice, nearly doubling Lightspeed's 30% and Clover's 28%. The remaining field fragments across specialized niches—7shifts for scheduling, Restaurant365 for back-office operations, MarketMan for inventory—suggesting buyers assemble best-of-breed stacks rather than adopt all-in-one suites. With 56 consensus brands but only 12 reaching evaluation, the category exhibits high awareness but concentrated decision-making.
168 discovery queries · 180 head-to-heads · refreshed Oct 22, 2026
Discovery stage
The shortlist
Across 168 buyer-style "Hospitality & Restaurants" queries
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Signal by intent
By topic
Top 5 most-cited brands per intent cluster. Brands with zero citations in a topic are not shown.
Evaluation stage
Head-to-head
How often AI cites each brand across uniform category evaluation prompts · median 3/100
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Each brand's score is the share of category evaluation prompts where AI cited them across all four engines — the same prompt pool for every brand. Brands above the median citation rate have stronger presence in evaluation-stage queries.
Brands to know
In this category
Toast
Captures half of restaurant POS shortlists through comprehensive front- and back-of-house integration purpose-built for full-service dining.
Read brand profile →Lightspeed
Secures 30% shortlist rate by serving quick-service restaurants and retail-restaurant hybrids that Toast's model doesn't address.
Read brand profile →Mews
Leads modern hotel PMS consideration at 18% by replacing legacy systems with cloud-native property management for boutique and midsize properties.
Read brand profile →Citation sources
Where AI pulls citations from
686 citations captured across Hospitality & Restaurants prompt runs.
Vendor pages
140Product, help, and marketing pages from tracked vendors
Independent sources
147Reviews, encyclopedias, forums, press — not vendor-owned
Buyer questions
What AI cites for top Hospitality & Restaurants questions
Most-cited prompts across the buyer journey. Click any prompt to see the actual URLs AI engines link to.
Discovery
Buyers exploring the categoryEvaluation
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