Grubhub's $23.8M FTC refunds: listed without consent

The checks are going out. The FTC announced on August 12 that it is sending 640,038 payments totaling more than $23.8 million to Grubhub drivers and diners. The refunds are the tail end of a 2024 case, and buried in that case is the fact every small business owner should read twice: Grubhub listed as many as 325,000 restaurants on its platform without their permission — more than half of every restaurant available on the app.

What actually happened

The FTC and the Illinois Attorney General brought the action in December 2024. Grubhub agreed to pay $25 million to settle. The complaint covered three groups:

• Diners — deceived about delivery costs, and blocked from their own accounts and funds, including unredeemed gift cards.
• Drivers — deceived about the earnings they could expect.
• Restaurants — added to the platform since at least 2019 without consent, to make the marketplace look bigger than it was. The complaint alleges Grubhub sometimes refused to take a restaurant down after it asked.

The consequences landed on the businesses that never opted in. Diners ordering from an unaffiliated restaurant paid higher fees and hit ordering problems — wrong menus, wrong prices, orders that failed. The complaint says restaurants absorbed the resulting anger, reputation damage, and lost revenue for a channel they had not agreed to be on.

The order requires Grubhub to advertise driver pay honestly, give diners a way to dispute a blocked account, and list restaurants only with their consent. If you get a check, cash it within 90 days; PayPal payments need to be accepted within 30.

Why unauthorized marketplace listings matter for your business

Delivery apps are the loudest example, not the only one. Product feeds, price aggregators, directory sites, and AI shopping agents all scrape and republish businesses that never signed anything. Your hours, your prices, and your catalog end up on surfaces you do not control, stale, and the one-star review comes to you.

Three moves, in order of how fast they pay off.

Go looking. Search your business name plus every major marketplace and aggregator in your category, once a quarter. Most owners find at least one listing they did not create. Removal requests work better than people expect — and now there is enforcement precedent behind them.

Keep one canonical source. Prices, hours, menu, SKUs, and availability should live in one system you own and push outward. When a marketplace shows the wrong price, you want to fix it in one place, not seven. This is the same discipline we described for live commerce sellers — the marketplace keeps its own copy of everything, so yours has to be the one that's right.

Give customers a direct path. A working direct-order channel — your own site, your own checkout, your own margin — is the only listing nobody can create or misprice on your behalf. Every marketplace order is rented demand. The direct one is yours.

Sources: FTC refund announcement, August 2026, FTC and Illinois AG action, December 2024.