Google discontinued the Q&A feature on Business Profiles. The underlying API went offline on November 3, 2025, and the customer-facing Q&A section in profiles and in Google Maps was rolled back in stages starting December 3, 2025; it is now largely gone from listings. In its place, Google is rolling out an AI feature that answers questions about a business in real time by pulling from your profile, your reviews, and your website, instead of a list your customers used to build entry by entry.
For contractors who used Q&A to head off common questions before the phone even rang (financing terms, service area, emergency availability) this removes a channel and puts the burden on you to make sure that information lives somewhere else before it disappears from view entirely. Here is the timeline, what happens to old entries, and what actually replaces the feature.
The timeline
Google announced the retirement of the Business Profile Q&A API on September 17, 2025. The API itself went dark on November 3, 2025, after which businesses and third-party tools could no longer read or post Q&A content programmatically. Starting December 3, 2025, Google began phasing out the customer-visible Q&A section across profiles and Maps, without announcing a single global cutoff date for every listing. If you open a Business Profile today, the old feature is, in most cases, simply not there anymore.
The gap between the two dates matters: the API shutdown was a single hard stop, but the disappearance from the customer-facing view was a staggered rollout that played out over weeks. That is why some businesses saw the feature linger into December while it vanished from others almost immediately.
Why Google pulled the feature
Google’s official explanation is that the Q&A section became harder to use as profiles aged. Every listing that had been live for a while accumulated questions over time, and customers increasingly struggled to find a current, specific answer buried under older entries. Google frames the change as a rework of that experience rather than letting the list keep growing indefinitely.
Separate from that official framing, industry reporting has flagged practical problems with the old format for a while. Because anyone with a Google account could post or answer a question, listings regularly picked up wrong information from well-meaning strangers, and in some documented cases from competitors posting misleading answers on purpose. Questions could also be edited after a business had already responded, which left a perfectly good answer attached to an entirely different question. Whether those issues were the actual trigger or just a symptom of the clutter Google describes is not something outsiders can fully separate, but the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.
What happens to existing Q&A content
This is worth being precise about. Up until the API shutdown on November 3, 2025, existing Q&A content could still be read and exported through the API. Google told business owners in its own Business Profile forum that existing questions could remain in place for a while and that owners could keep answering them during the transition. The public display changed independently of that, on a staggered rollout, so older entries may no longer be visible to customers depending on the specific listing and how far the rollout has progressed for it.
In practice: an old entry was not necessarily wiped on one fixed date, but nothing guarantees it stays publicly visible either. If your Q&A section held information customers relied on, directions, emergency hours, financing options, stop looking for it there and get it documented somewhere you control instead.
Ask Maps: the AI replacement
In place of the old Q&A list, Google is rolling out an AI-driven feature that shows up in available references as both Ask Maps and Ask about this place; a single settled name has not emerged yet. It lets a Maps user ask a real-time question about a place, and Google generates the answer automatically from available sources, including your Business Profile, your reviews, and other content Google can find on the web, including your own website.
The distinction that matters: Ask Maps is not a new management console where you write and publish your own Q&A pairs. It is a Google-side generative feature that assembles an answer from existing data without you drafting or approving individual entries. Rollout varies by market, device, and listing, and as of August 2026 Google has also been testing a revised version of the format.
What contractors should actually do now
You cannot manage Q&A entries anymore, but you can still shape how good an AI-generated answer about your business turns out to be. The moves that matter most:
| Action | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Keep Services descriptions and attributes complete in your profile | Ask Maps draws on these fields directly; outdated details show up verbatim in generated answers |
| Build a real FAQ section on your own website for common customer questions | Stays under your control, unlike the retired profile feature, and gives AI answer engines a readable source to pull from |
| Actively collect and respond to reviews | Google draws on review content for generated answers too; thin or unanswered reviews give it less reliable context to work with |
| Save any old Q&A entries still visible on your listing | Information documented nowhere else can disappear from the public view without warning |
The second item does the most work. A maintained FAQ page on your own site does not replace the retired profile feature one for one, but unlike a Google profile field, it stays entirely under your control, and you can mark it up with FAQ schema for machines to parse independent of how Google chooses to display it in search results.
The bigger picture
For most contractors, the old Q&A section was a minor part of the profile next to category, hours, and reviews. But the underlying shift is worth noting: Google is visibly moving weight away from lists customers built by hand and toward AI-generated answers pulled from several sources at once. If you rely on the profile alone, you are handing an automated feature full control over how your business gets represented from data Google already has. If you also run a maintained website with clear answers to the questions customers actually ask, you give that feature better raw material to work with, and you depend less on whatever Google decides to display or retire next.
Mr.Site runs several hundred business websites for home service companies, including ongoing upkeep of visibility details like this through managed website service. For setting up a listing cleanly from scratch, see How to Create a Google Business Profile, for how the listing and your website work together, see Connect Your Google Business Profile and Website.