Where did Google Business Profile Q&A go, and how do you make Google answer customers correctly?

What happened to Q&A on Google Business Profile?

Google retired it. The Q&A API was discontinued on 3 November 2025, according to Google’s developer documentation, and the public Questions & Answers section has since been removed from profiles in waves.

Q&A launched in 2017 as a place where anyone could ask a business a question on Maps and anyone (the owner or another customer) could answer it. Google’s change log says the API was switched off because Google is updating the Q&A feature and experience.

There is one nuance worth acting on. A Google Product Specialist said in the Business Profile Help forum that owners can still answer existing and aggregated customer questions in the Q&A area of the Business Profile backend, and that those answers may be used to help answer similar questions in Maps (reported by Search Engine Roundtable). So open your profile dashboard and check whether any questions are waiting for an answer.

Google has not formally called Ask Maps “the Q&A replacement”. What it has done is move question answering about places to Gemini, through Ask Maps.

What is Ask Maps (and “Ask about this place”)?

Ask Maps is a conversational Gemini feature inside Google Maps: a customer types a question in plain words and gets a written answer. Google announced it on 12 March 2026, rolling out in the U.S. and India on Android and iOS, with desktop following; Google’s Maps Help now documents a computer version too.

• The “Ask” button on a profile. On a business’s own listing, the “Ask” or “Ask about this place” button lets a customer ask about that one place: “Do they open early on Sunday?”, “Is there parking?”
• Scale. Google says Maps analyses information from over 300 million places, including reviews from more than 500 million contributors.
• Answers are personalised. Google says results depend on things like places a person has searched for or saved, so two customers can see different answers to the same question.
• Answers can be wrong. Google’s own help page warns that “AI-powered answers can sometimes be incorrect.”

Where does Google get the answers about my business?

From your Business Profile, your reviews, your website and other public information about you. Some of these Google has confirmed, and some are only reported by people who study local search.

• Business Profile fields: categories, services and products, hours and special hours, attributes, and your description. These are the facts Maps already shows.
• Reviews: confirmed. Google’s launch post describes Ask Maps drawing on reviews from its contributor community.
• Photos: reported, not confirmed by Google. Industry sources list photos as an input; Google has not said so in its own documentation.
• Your website and other web content: Google’s help page says Ask Maps answers come with links to the web, so pages about your business can feed and support the answer.

What should I do with my old Q&A answers?

Move each one to where Google can still read it: short facts into profile fields, and anything that needs explaining onto your website. Sort them like this:

• Short facts go into profile fields. “Open Sundays?” belongs in your hours. “Wheelchair access?” belongs in attributes.
• Explanations go on your website’s service pages. How a treatment works, what an alteration involves, what a package includes.
• Recurring questions go in a website FAQ on the relevant page, with FAQPage markup that matches the visible text exactly.
• Policies are stated plainly on the website: delivery areas, returns, appointment and cancellation rules, and the payment options you accept.

“Q&A seeding”, posting your own questions and answering them, no longer works, because the public section it relied on is gone.

Checklist: how to make Gemini answer correctly about your business

Make every source Gemini reads complete, current and consistent, then test what it says. Work through these in order:

1. Use the most specific primary category, and add only accurate secondary ones. It tells Google what you are.
2. Set regular hours and special hours for festivals and holidays (Diwali, Ugadi, Eid, Christmas). “Are they open today?” is the commonest question.
3. Fill every attribute that applies, and double-check any Google added from customer input. Attributes answer yes/no questions directly.
4. List services or products with plain names and, where you’re comfortable, prices. Customers ask in plain words.
5. Make your name, address and phone number match exactly across your profile, website and WhatsApp. Mismatches make answers hedge.
6. Upload current photos of the entrance, signboard, interior and your work or products. They help customers, whatever role they play in answers.
7. Reply to reviews, and politely correct factual mistakes (“We do take Sunday appointments”). Reviews are a confirmed source.
8. Put prices, service areas, timings, policies and an FAQ on indexed website pages, with the answer in the first sentence. The profile has no field for most of these.
9. Add LocalBusiness schema to your website so it matches your profile. It states your details in a form machines read.
10. Test it once a month. Open Google Maps, tap Ask Maps and ask five customer questions. Open the source links, take a screenshot, and fix the source if anything is wrong. Ask a friend to repeat the test, since answers are personalised.
11. Check your hours and phone number monthly, because user-suggested edits can change them without you noticing.

Examples by business type

Every customer question has one right home: a profile field, a website page, or both. Here is where common questions should be answered for five kinds of business.

Can I pay, opt out or edit Google’s AI answer?

No to all three. Google documents no paid placement in Ask Maps and no setting that removes your business from it, and you can’t edit the answer itself. What you can do is fix the sources it is built from.

Customers can also rate an answer with the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons under it, which sends feedback to Google. If you spot a wrong answer while testing, send that feedback too, then correct the source.

How NebulaForge helps

We help set up and tidy your Google Business Profile, and we build fast, custom-coded websites whose service, FAQ and policy pages give Google clear answers. Our SEO & Performance work covers technical SEO, schema and Core Web Vitals.

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Maintenance is ₹899/month on every plan. The pricing page has the full comparison. We serve all of Bangalore, plus clients elsewhere in India and worldwide; see how we work as a website design company in Bangalore.

No one, including us, can guarantee how Google’s AI answers. We make sure the facts it reads are complete and consistent.

Sources

Every Google fact on this page comes from the pages below. Checked 21 Oct 2026.

• Google, “How we’re reimagining Maps with Gemini” (12 Mar 2026)
• Google for Developers, Q&A API change log
• Google Maps Help, “Ask questions in Google Maps”
• Search Engine Roundtable, “Google Changing Q&A Feature In Google Maps For Ask”
• Adatek Agency, “What Replaced Google Business Profile Q&A” (12 Sep 2026)
• Good At Marketing, “Google Ask Maps and Gemini: What Local Businesses Can Do” (Oct 2026)