Sitebrief — restaurant scouting with evidence

Find areas to investigate for your next restaurant. A bounded Gemini tool workflow combines real Qloo evidence, operator rules and web-source discovery. The output is a scouting visit plan, not a lease recommendation.

• Production: https://sitebrief-circuitstudio.vercel.app
• Release evidence: verified versions and review previews.
• Source: https://github.com/circuitstudioai/sitebrief · MIT.

The repository and Vercel project were renamed from collab-scout to sitebrief without replacing either resource. The old GitHub links redirect, and the old collab-scout.vercel.app address remains a compatibility alias. Historical validation receipts keep their originally observed URLs.

The decision

1. Choose a city, radius and audience references. Exact brands resolve before same-name outlets.
2. Apply optional outlet buffers, a minimum city-local popularity floor and the taste screen.
3. Rank by local affinity percentile minus popularity percentile; preserve actual ties.
4. Let the agent inspect audience tags, signed demographic affinity, related brands and a nearby-venue comparison, then research an eligible point.
5. The agent chooses an eligible ID and check codes. Code—not model prose—states actual rank and ties. The server locks the highest-ranked eligible visit before research. Research and the final visit must match by point ID and coordinates; a later model response cannot switch areas.
6. Inspect sources and download a one-page PDF or full notes. Known-address comparison remains available at /compare with a clearly labelled fixed sample.

Balanced discovery excludes the lowest20% of measured local popularity; established popularity uses the median. These are disclosed exploratory settings, not observed visitor counts or validated commercial thresholds. Missing popularity coverage produces no shortlist rather than silently waiving the floor. No downtown exclusion or competitor scarcity score is imposed.

Try the recording journey

Click Try Blue Bottle in Toronto for the proposed expansion example. Or try the playground café retains the owner’s secondary new-concept scenario. Local café references come from Qloo's returned Toronto café-tagged sample, not an exhaustive city leaderboard or proof of family demand. Prices, hours and existing outlets remain unspecified.

Watch actual tool activity, inspect rank/ties and floor, inspect a retrieved source, and download the PDF. Generated local summaries are withheld: source proximity is not yet verified. Four research fields show “Local evidence unavailable; summary withheld.” Retrieved links are sources to inspect, not validated findings. Qloo ranks and tentative Maybe cards remain available; Skip cards explain actual rejected rules. Mapped OSM café/restaurant counts add descriptive context, never an unmet-demand claim. Reused real runs show their original time. On unavailable/incomplete live evidence, the canonical example can show a clearly labelled saved reference run with its original date and only the saved highlights. Custom briefs never receive that saved café. The live demo has a60-second work deadline; Gemini/research cancellation prevents later model stages. A separate shared Upstash Redis budget protects live requests. The Free store is configured with an atomic allowance of 50 top-level live jobs per UTC day per environment. Store errors and exhaustion fail closed. Source-discovery reuse requires at least two distinct source links for the exact visit point; this is not the former three-field research-quality gate. See setup.

Provider roles

Request	Evidence
Qloo /search, optionally brand-only	Verified audience entity IDs
/v2/insights heatmap	Original affinity, popularity and affinity rank
/v2/insights places	Deduplicated nearby dining sample
/v2/insights tags/demographics/brands	Audience taste, signed reference affinities and brand connections
/v2/analysis/compare	Returned shared/separate reference and venue tags
Gemini2.5Flash function calls	Allowed tool selection and structured eligible decision codes
Google Search grounding	Source links to inspect; local summaries withheld, not Qloo scores

Qloo host is https://hackathon.api.qloo.com, with server-side X-Api-Key. No failed live call becomes invented/sample evidence. Removing Qloo removes the actual shortlist evidence.

MCP

/api/mcp exposes five read-only tools over stateless Streamable HTTP: exploration, known-site comparison, audience profile, research and the full scouting agent. Test interoperability with the official MCP SDK; no claim that every branded client was separately installed. Allow a180-second timeout for a complete scout call.

{"mcpServers":{"sitebrief":{"url":"https://sitebrief-circuitstudio.vercel.app/api/mcp"}}}

Shared daily admission is active: Upstash Redis atomically admits up to 50 top-level live jobs per UTC day per environment (Preview and Production counters are separate). Missing/unavailable storage and exhaustion fail closed. This is not a hard provider billing cap. Per-visitor limits and MCP authentication remain deferred; per-instance concurrency limits are additional protection, not the daily ceiling.

Development and evidence

npm ci
npm run dev
npm test -- --runInBand
npm run lint
npm run build

Configure server-only QLOO_API_KEY, QLOO_API_URL and GEMINI_API_KEY; redeploy after Vercel changes. See setup, product scope, architecture, method, verification and recording guide.

Current follow-up evidence belongs in docs/quality/. Older dated JSON/image artifacts retain their original URLs and do not prove a newer release. Obsolete product/internal notes were removed; Git history retains them.

Limits

Taste/popularity are not measured footfall, demand, rents, available units, revenue or success. Nearby samples do not establish a market gap. Source citations are not a universal accuracy guarantee. Verify premises, access, permissions and operating economics in person. No customer validation or study-cost savings are claimed.

Visitor and usage counts

See analytics setup and measurement definitions. Production visitor/page counts use Vercel Web Analytics. Fixed, anonymous feature-action counts use the existing Free Redis store, without a Pro upgrade. Preview traffic, user-entered data and session replay are excluded. Collection starts after the instrumented production release; counts are not customer validation.