Where the answer comes from when an agent asks for a table.

In September 2026 Resy deactivated a diner’s account after his AI agent searched for a table around 200 times an hour.

Resy deactivated a diner’s account this month for pointing an AI agent at it. The agent hit the site around 200 times an hour looking for a table at 4 Charles. Most of the argument since has been about whether banning him was fair. With my reservations hat on, I think it probably was. But what I’ve been thinking about instead is where the answer comes from when an assistant asks whether you have a table on Saturday.

It either comes from a copy of your availability, or it comes direct from your diary.

Reserve with Google is the copy version. Providers send Google a daily feed with real time updates on top, Google stores it, and the agent reads Google’s version. Google does check the slot with the platform before it confirms, but the search and the shortlist come out of its own copy. That’s how Google launched booking in AI Mode without building anything new. They already had the inventory.

The other version is a live query. Availability stays in the diary. The agent asks when it needs to know and the platform answers. Nothing gets copied.

The difference isn’t freshness. The real time updates keep the copy close enough. It’s what the format can express. A table management system holds a lot more than times and covers, and things like offers don’t always map cleanly into someone else’s schema. The guest never gets offered whatever doesn’t map.

Whoever the agent asks is the one who learns what the guest wanted. Party of six, eight o’clock Saturday, somewhere near Soho, nothing too loud. Ask Google’s copy and Google hears all of it, including the times that didn’t work and the venues that got passed over. You and your platform only hear about the one that turned into a booking.

I’ve built the live query version. An MCP server on top of an existing reservation platform’s booking and availability APIs. It took days, not months, because the authentication, the scopes and the rate limits were already there for POS and channel partners. Every established platform in this market has the same. So the hold up isn’t engineering.

Part of it is that nobody opens a channel without a deal attached. The bigger part is that several of these platforms are marketplaces themselves. OpenTable, Resy and TheFork sell discovery, and an agent booking straight into the diary competes with the thing they sell. The platforms with no marketplace to protect have the least to lose by moving first.

Worth asking your reservation provider where their availability sits when an assistant goes looking for it.