Google Business Profile Q&A Removed: What to Do

You have probably been told that your Google Business Profile is where customers go to get their questions answered. Opening hours, parking, whether you take cards, whether they need to book. Fill in the profile, answer the odd question in the Q&A box, and Google does the rest. That advice was reasonable two years ago. It is not true any more, and most business owners I talk to have no idea it changed.

Google has quietly taken the public question-and-answer thread off Business Profiles. In its place is an AI that writes the answer itself. So the question worth asking is no longer "have I answered the questions on my profile?" It is "when Google's AI answers a question about my business, what is it reading?"

Let me take the old advice apart, piece by piece.

Myth one: customers can still read the answers you posted

They mostly cannot. Google's developer documentation records that the My Business Q&A API was discontinued on 3 November 2025, "as we are in the process of updating the Q&A functionality and user experience" ^[1]. That was the first signal. The second came a few weeks later, when Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable that customers can now "ask their question directly in Google Maps and get an updated, instant answer based on your answers and relevant reviews" ^[2].

Read that sentence twice. The customer no longer scrolls a thread of questions and sees your reply with your name on it. They tap an Ask button and get a paragraph Google has composed.

Your old answers have not been thrown away. Google told business owners that "your published questions and answers will continue to power Google's understanding of the real world and may be shown in Maps" ^[2]. May be. That is a long way from "will be, in your words, exactly as you wrote them".

What this means in practice

The Q&A section still exists in the back end of your profile, and you can still answer questions there.
The public thread, the bit customers used to browse, has been replaced with an AI answer on most profiles.
The answer blends what you wrote with what reviewers wrote, and you do not get to approve the blend.

That last point is the one that should bother you.

Myth two: your profile is the source Google trusts most

It is one source among several, and on some questions it is outvoted.

When Google launched Ask Maps in March 2026, it said the feature draws on information from over 300 million places, "including reviews from our community of more than 500 million contributors" ^[3]. The August expansion took Ask Maps to over 150 countries and territories in English, according to reporting from 9to5Google ^[6]. Google's announcements did not list every country by name, so I would not promise you it is on every phone in Ireland today. The direction of travel is not in doubt, though.

Then there is Google Search itself. AI Mode is now available in over 200 countries and territories, according to Google's own announcement in October 2025 ^[4], and it answers questions by reading web pages and linking to the ones it relies on. So a customer who asks Google "does that cycle hire place do e-bikes" might get an answer built from your profile, from a review, or from your website. Often all three.

Which one wins when they disagree? Nobody outside Google can tell you for certain. What you can control is whether they disagree at all.

Myth three: reviews are about reputation, not information

This is where the change gets personal.

Reviews used to be opinions. Now they are raw material. If a reviewer wrote three years ago that "there's no parking so we had to leave the car miles away", that sentence is sitting in the pile Google reads when the next customer asks about parking. It does not matter that you have since agreed a spot with the hotel next door. The review is still there. Your answer, if it exists, is somewhere the AI may or may not weigh it.

Consider a scenario that fits this change exactly. A Leitrim cycle-hire business near the Greenway starts offering e-bikes in spring. Two older reviews mention "no electric bikes, only standard ones". A family planning a day out asks Google whether they can hire e-bikes for two grandparents. The answer comes back hedged, or plain wrong, and they book with the outfit twenty minutes up the road whose website says "e-bikes available, book ahead in July and August" in the first paragraph.

Nobody rang. Nobody complained. The booking just went elsewhere, and the owner will never know it existed.

That is the cost of this change. It does not show up as a bad review or an angry email. It shows up as a quiet week in what should have been a busy one.

Google's own help pages confirm how porous this is. Business attributes, the tick-boxes for things like wheelchair access, Wi-Fi and outdoor seating, can be set by you, but Google also notes that "there are attributes that may be populated based on inputs from customers who visit your business" ^[5]. Customers are describing your business to Google whether you join in or not.

The answer a customer sees is now assembled from several sources, not written by you.

Myth four: a website is a brochure, not an answer source

I used to tell business owners that the Q&A box on their profile was a nice extra and their website was where the real selling happened. I had the split backwards. The website is now where the answering happens too, because it is the one source in this whole system where every word is yours, nothing is mixed in, and you can change it in minutes.

So what does a website that works as an answer source actually look like? Before I mention what we do, here is the standard I would hold any site to:

It states the practical facts in plain sentences. "Free parking for six cars behind the shop" beats a photo of the car park with no caption. AI systems read words far more reliably than they interpret pictures.
It answers questions where customers would look for them. Parking and access on the contact or visit page. Booking rules on the booking page. Dietary information on the menu page. Not all buried in one long FAQ nobody reaches.
It is quick to change. If you add e-bikes on a Tuesday, the website should say so on Tuesday, not after a three-week wait for a web designer to fit you in.
It loads fast and cleanly. A page that times out or hides its text behind scripts is a page that any reader, human or machine, struggles with.
It is yours. Your domain, your content, your control. No platform deciding which of your sentences survive.

Web60 was built to meet that standard. You describe your business and the AI builder sets up a full WordPress website in about 60 seconds, and from then on every page is yours to edit, with no change requests and no hourly rate. It runs on Irish infrastructure with Nginx, Redis object caching and page caching, which in plain terms means your pages arrive quickly for the customer on a phone in a car park and for whatever crawler is reading them on Google's behalf. All of it is included in €60 a year.

If the wider picture of how AI is reshaping what a business website needs to do is new to you, our guide to AI-powered WordPress for business owners covers the ground in more depth.

How to answer customers before they ask, in five steps

This is the practical bit. None of it needs technical skill, and most of it takes an afternoon.

Audit your questions. Go through your emails, texts, phone notes and your old profile Q&A, and list every question a customer has asked more than once. The list is usually shorter than people expect, because the same handful keeps coming back: parking, payment methods, booking, access, allergies, delivery areas and Sunday hours.
Verify what Google already says. Search for your business, open the profile, and use the Ask button or AI Mode to put three or four of those questions to Google yourself. Write down every answer that is vague, outdated or wrong. That list is your priority order.
Deploy the answers on your own pages. Put each answer as a plain sentence on the page where it belongs. One clear fact per sentence. Use the words your customers use, so "wheelchair accessible" rather than "mobility-friendly premises".
Update the profile to match. Fix your attributes, answer any remaining questions in the Q&A section of your Business Profile dashboard, and reply to reviews where an old fact is now wrong. A short, friendly reply saying "we now have parking behind the shop" adds a fresh, correct statement to the pile.
Verify again in a month. Ask Google the same questions. Some answers will have changed, some will not. Repeat the cycle every season or whenever something about the business changes.

Step four matters more than it looks. Your website, your profile and your review replies should say the same thing. When every source agrees, there is nothing for the AI to guess about.

When your website, your profile and your review replies agree, there is less for the AI to guess about.

What this cannot do for you

I want to be straight about the limits, because overselling this would be easy.

There is no setting on your website that forces Google to quote it. Google has not published how the Ask feature weighs your answers against reviews, and it can still produce a wrong answer even when your site is perfectly clear. If you want to understand why that happens and what to do when it does, our piece on what to do when AI has the wrong information about your business covers that failure in detail. What a clear website does is shorten the odds. It gives Google a clean, current, first-party statement to find, and it gives the customer who clicks through a straight answer when they land.

It is also fair to say this matters more for some businesses than others. If your customers are mostly regulars who ring you directly, or your work comes almost entirely through referrals, you do not need to rebuild anything for this. A tidy profile and a website that states your hours and contact details will cover you. The businesses that feel this most are the ones where a stranger is deciding between you and a competitor based on a practical detail: hospitality, visitor attractions, clinics, trades that cover a defined area, and anyone whose opening hours shift with the seasons.

Conclusion

The Q&A box on your Business Profile used to be a small, direct line between you and a curious customer. That line has been replaced by an AI that reads everything written about you and decides what to say. You cannot switch that off, and there is no point resenting it.

What you can do is make sure the most complete, current and clearly written account of your business is the one you own. Write down the questions customers keep asking. Answer them in plain sentences on your own pages. Make your profile and your review replies agree with it. Then ask Google the same questions next month and see what it says back.

The customers asking those questions have already decided they are interested. The job now is to make sure the answer they get is yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has Google removed Q&A from Google Business Profiles?

Largely, yes. Google discontinued the Q&A API on 3 November 2025, and the public question thread has since been replaced on most profiles by an Ask button that generates an AI answer. Businesses can still answer questions in the Q&A section of the Business Profile dashboard, and Google says those answers continue to inform what it shows in Maps.

Where does Google's AI get its answers about my business?

Google says the Ask feature on a profile draws on the answers you have given and relevant reviews. Ask Maps draws on its database of places and reviews from its contributors. AI Mode in Google Search reads web pages and links to the ones it uses. In practice, your profile, your reviews and your website all feed the answer customers see.

Can I stop Google's AI from answering questions about my business?

No. There is no setting that turns the AI answers off for your profile. What you can do is make sure the information it reads is accurate and consistent: a complete profile, correct attributes, review replies that correct outdated facts, and a website that states the practical details clearly.

Should I put an FAQ page on my website?

An FAQ page is still useful for customers, but it works best as a supplement. Put each practical answer on the page where a customer would expect it, such as parking on your contact page and booking rules on your booking page, and use the FAQ page to gather anything that does not fit elsewhere.

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

Log in to your Business Profile, review the existing questions and answers, and update or correct any that are out of date. Google has said published answers continue to power its understanding of your business, so a stale answer there can still feed a wrong AI response.

Is Ask Maps available in Ireland?

Google expanded Ask Maps in August 2026 to over 150 countries and territories in English, but its announcement did not list every country by name. Whether you see it depends on your device, your app version and Google's rollout. AI Overviews already appear for searchers in Ireland, and AI Mode is available in over 200 countries and territories, so the advice in this article applies either way.