What happened to the Q&A section on Google Business Profile?

Google turned it off. The old Q&A section let anyone post a question under a business listing and let the owner or other customers answer it in writing. Google shut down the Q&A API in late 2025 and retired the public section shortly after, replacing it with an AI tool called Ask Maps. Questions and answers that were posted before the shutdown are no longer visible to customers and were not carried over.

Ask Maps is a Gemini-powered feature in Google Maps and Search. Instead of a customer reading a question and answer someone wrote months ago, they tap "Ask about this place," type a question, and Google's AI generates a fresh answer on the spot by pulling from whatever it can find about the business.

Does Ask Maps use my website to answer customer questions?

Yes. Ask Maps draws on your Google Business Profile fields, your customer reviews, and your website. If your website clearly states your service area, pricing approach, financing, warranty, and hours, Ask Maps has real material to answer from. If you have no website, or only a social page, it has far less to work with and is more likely to give a vague, generic, or wrong answer.

Do I need to do anything about my old Q&A questions on Google?

No - the old questions and answers are already gone from public view and there is nothing to migrate or restore. What is worth doing is checking what Ask Maps currently says about your business by asking it a few real customer questions yourself, and fixing any gap by making sure the answer actually lives somewhere on your website or your profile.

RunCabin Blog · Getting found

What happened to the Q&A section on my Google Business Profile?

October 11, 2026 · 8 min read

Short answer: Google turned it off and replaced it with an AI tool called Ask Maps. The old Q&A, where a customer could post a question under your listing and you or anyone else could type an answer, is gone. In its place, a customer taps "Ask about this place" and Google's AI writes a fresh answer on the spot, pulled from your profile, your reviews, and your website.

If you noticed the Q&A tab missing, or a customer mentioned asking your listing a question you never wrote an answer to, you are not imagining it. Here is what actually changed, why it matters more than it sounds, and what to do about it.

What the old Q&A actually was

For years, any Google Business Profile had a Q&A section sitting under the reviews. A customer could post "do you offer free estimates?" or "are you open on Sundays?" and the question just sat there, visible to everyone, until the owner - or a stranger, or nobody - answered it. Smart owners seeded their own listing with the questions they got asked most and answered them themselves, which is exactly the advice most local-SEO guides gave for years. It was crude, but it was yours: you wrote the words, and they stayed up until you changed them.

What replaced it: Ask Maps

Google discontinued the Q&A API in November 2025 and began retiring the public Q&A section the following month, replacing it with a Gemini-powered feature called Ask Maps. The mechanics are different in a way that matters: Ask Maps does not store a question-and-answer pair for anyone to read later. Every time a customer asks something, the AI generates a new answer in real time by pulling from whatever current information it can find about the business - not from a library of answers you or a stranger wrote in 2024.

The old questions and answers were not carried over. If you had a well-answered Q&A section, that work is no longer visible to customers, and there is no setting to bring it back. Ask Maps is simply a different system, and it reads different sources.

Where Ask Maps actually gets its answers

This is the part that changes what you should do next. Ask Maps draws on three places:

Your Google Business Profile fields - hours, category, attributes, services you have listed on the profile itself.
Your reviews - what customers have said, including details they mentioned that you never explicitly wrote anywhere (a review that says "they matched a competitor's quote" can genuinely shape how the AI answers a pricing question).
Your website - whatever text actually exists on the pages customers can reach.

Under the old system, if a customer asked something you had not thought to answer in the Q&A box, you could just go type an answer and it was handled by dinner. Under Ask Maps, there is no box to type into. The only way to influence what the AI says is to make sure the real answer exists somewhere it can read - which for most small businesses means the website, because a Business Profile's fields are too limited to cover financing terms, a warranty policy, or exactly which towns you cover.

The gap this opens for businesses without a real website

A business with nothing but a Google Business Profile and a Facebook page is now handing Ask Maps very little to work with. Ask a profile-only landscaper's listing "do they offer a maintenance plan" or "do they serve the next town over," and the AI either guesses from a thin profile and a handful of reviews, stays vague, or says it does not know - any of which can cost the click to a competitor whose site actually spells it out.

Customer asks Ask Maps	What it needs to answer well
"Do they offer financing?"	A clear financing statement on the website, not just a verbal yes at the job site
"Do they come to my town?"	A stated service area, ideally the actual town named on a page
"Is there a warranty on the work?"	A written guarantee or warranty policy
"Do they charge for estimates?"	A plain answer on the site, not left to a phone call
"Can I pay a deposit online?"	A stated deposit or payment policy

Every row in that table is a question RunCabin's own planner already asks new customers to answer when we build their site - not because we predicted Ask Maps, but because those are the same questions a human visitor has always had. The difference now is that an AI reads the answer on your behalf and repeats it to a customer who never even clicked through to your site.

What to actually do about it

Ask Maps your own listing. Search your business on Google Maps, tap "Ask about this place," and type the three or four questions customers actually ask you on the phone. See what it says.
Fix the gaps on your website, not just your profile. Profile fields are thin by design - hours, category, a short description. Anything with real nuance (financing, warranty, service area, deposits, pricing approach) belongs on a page Ask Maps can read.
Keep asking for reviews that mention specifics. A review that happens to mention "same-day service" or "no charge for the estimate" is free training data for the AI's answer the next time someone asks.
Do not try to game it. There is no longer a box to post a self-serving answer into. The AI is reading real content and real reviews, which rewards businesses that are actually clear about what they do, not businesses that are good at writing Q&A copy.

Where RunCabin fits

We build RunCabin's done-for-you websites with AI, finished by a web developer, from a planner that asks exactly the questions customers - and now Ask Maps - actually want answered: your service area, your pricing approach, financing, deposits, warranty, hours. Those answers land on real pages on your own domain, written in plain language, which is precisely the kind of source Google's AI pulls from when it generates an answer about your business. It starts at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month for hosting, with no long contract, and every inquiry lands straight in your inbox with no lead fees.

You cannot write a canned answer for Ask Maps anymore. But you can make sure the real one is sitting on a page it can read.

Give the AI something real to read

Answer our questionnaire and we build your site - your name, your work, your city. It's built with AI and finished by a web developer. Starting at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month.

Start our planner →