Restaurants can take orders inside ChatGPT with no marketplace commission.

In July 2026 Square switched on ordering through ChatGPT and Claude for its US food and beverage sellers.

In May I wrote that being found by an AI is only half the problem, and being bookable through one is the other half. The ordering version of that just arrived.

At the start of July, Square switched on integrations with ChatGPT and Claude for its US food and beverage sellers. A guest asks the assistant where to get lunch, the assistant surfaces the menu, and the order lands directly in the restaurant’s existing Square setup, through online ordering, into the POS and onto the kitchen screen. No setup, no engineering work, and automatic enrolment for anyone already running Square Online Ordering.

Let’s look at the economics. There is no marketplace commission on these orders. The restaurant pays standard card processing and nothing else. Compare that with the delivery platforms, where DoorDash’s own published partnership plans run from 15% to 30% per order. Even delivery is priced differently: when an AI order needs delivering, Square dispatches it through a white-label courier network at a flat fee, typically 7 to 10 dollars, absorbed by the restaurant or passed to the guest, rather than a percentage of the basket. Square has opened an AI ordering channel at a fraction of the cost of the marketplace one.

The architecture matters just as much. When I wrote about Deliveroo Reservations in May, the point was that the guest relationship runs through DoorDash infrastructure. The operator gets the booking, the platform gets the guest. Square’s model inverts that. The AI does the discovery, but the order, the payment, and the customer data flow into the restaurant’s own system, because Square is the restaurant’s system rather than a marketplace sitting in front of it.

Jay Sherman made exactly this point in the comments on that post: operators whose POS does the work are less exposed. This is what that looks like in practice.

Two caveats. It’s US only for now, and it’s ordering rather than reservations. But the direction is set. Square is also building a standard protocol for agent commerce with Google, which tells you they expect every AI assistant to become a sales channel, not just these two.

So here’s the question I’d be asking if I ran a restaurant. Who builds this rail for bookings? Hotel tech is already moving, with booking systems shipping direct AI connections this summer. No major restaurant reservation platform has done the same yet. Whoever moves first won’t take share from OpenTable or SevenRooms overnight, but they’d own the early ground in a channel that’s only going to grow, and they’d be doing for tables what Square just did for orders.