Definition

The mechanism by which third-party platforms capture the Guest’s attention at the discovery moment, before they choose a restaurant, and take ownership of the credit for that introduction. The platform curates, surfaces, and recommends. The operator provides the product. The platform owns the relationship with the Guest at the point of discovery.

Explanation

The word “credit” is doing precise work in this definition. The operator built the product that ultimately earns the Guest’s satisfaction, but the platform positions itself as the party that gets credit for the introduction — which means every future search for “a place like that” routes back through the platform rather than back to the operator directly.

This is the discovery-stage sibling to [Relationship Arbitrage], which extracts at the ongoing-relationship stage — together they describe a Guest relationship that can be captured by a third party at both ends, entry and retention, without the operator ever directly owning either. Recognizing [Discovery Arbitrage] is what motivates building direct discovery channels — search visibility, direct reputation, word of mouth engineered on purpose — rather than accepting platform discovery as the only available entry point and paying the toll on every Guest it introduces.