How BellyUp St. Pete Works

BellyUp runs on four steps, in order, and every page on this site is an output of one of them.

1. Collect

We gather public information about St. Pete venues.

• Restaurant websites and published menus
• Structured data, hours and location
• Public events, specials and listings
• Whether search engines and AI crawlers can reach the site at all

Nothing comes from anyone's personal visit. Once a venue claims its profile, whatever the restaurant tells us about itself joins that set.

Website checks are run by our own scanner against each venue's own site and its robots.txt. It identifies itself honestly as BellyUpDiscoveryBot, requests at normal rates, does not log in, and does not touch anything behind a form. It stores the pass, fail, or unknown result of each check and nothing else. If you run a venue and would rather it did not run against your site, tell us and it will not.

One thing worth knowing up front: some restaurant websites turn away any crawler they do not recognize. That is recorded as its own finding, separate from a site being down, because a restaurant whose site blocks crawlers is a restaurant AI cannot learn about. It is also separate from having no website on file, which we record as unknown rather than as a failure. Some St. Pete venues have no website at all, and a few have one that is a blank template or stuck in a redirect loop.

2. Structure

Raw information gets translated into discovery categories. Instead of only knowing that a restaurant exists, we build an understanding of what that restaurant could reasonably be discovered for. Some of that resolves automatically from a venue's attributes. The rest ... an origin story, a historic building, a bay view from the patio ... is tagged by hand against something we can point at.

The category taxonomy is public and readable by any crawler at /data/discovery-categories.json, and the venue dataset is public at /api/places.json. It is the same taxonomy every BellyUp city uses, which is what makes the cities comparable.

3. Measure

Then we check whether any of it is actually visible. Which venues are discoverable for a given category. Which experiences are poorly represented online. Whether AI can understand a venue's specialties. Whether its information is consistent and reachable. Which important categories are missing from the city entirely.

That measurement is published as the St. Pete Discovery Report and as a discovery profile on every venue page. Nobody can buy a position in either one.

4. Publish

The same dataset becomes the reading experience: discovery category pages, neighborhood pages, guides, and the audience sites below. One collection system feeding many sites is the whole design, which is why adding a new lens does not create a new editorial workload.

One venue, one record

Every restaurant, bar and late-night spot lives as a single record on bellyupstpete.com. Each record is tagged with what describes it, such as who it suits and what the room is like. There is no duplicate content across sites. Every audience site reads that same data and filters it for its audience:

• St. Pete Bars
• St. Pete BBQ
• Family Friendly St. Pete
• St. Pete Nightlife
• Over 50 St. Pete
• Vegan St. Pete

A venue can legitimately appear on more than one of them. A Central Avenue pizza place with vegan cheese on the menu, a kids slice and a late weekend close belongs on the vegan, family, bars and nightlife sites at once. That is by design, not a duplicate.

Community submissions

Anyone can submit a spot. Submissions are reviewed before they go live, and once approved they are always attributed to the person who submitted them, as a community recommendation and never as a BellyUp St. Pete claim. They add to the picture. They are not what the site runs on.

Verification and honesty

Every venue record notes when it was last verified and whether we confirmed it on the venue's own site or could only read it elsewhere. Hours, menus, and ownership change, so confirm directly with the venue before you go. A detail we cannot verify is left empty rather than guessed at, and it then shows up in that venue's discovery profile as a gap. If sponsored placement ever appears on BellyUp, it will be labeled as sponsored and kept out of every measurement we publish.