A woman in Stockbridge is standing in her kitchen at 9:40 on a Tuesday night looking at a water heater that’s started making a noise water heaters shouldn’t make. She opens Google Maps, finds your plumbing company, and types a question: do you do emergency calls after hours?
A year ago that question would have landed in the Q&A section of your Google Business Profile. You’d have gotten a notification. You could have answered it in your own words — “Yes, 24/7, no extra charge before 10pm” — and that answer would have sat there in writing for every future customer who asked the same thing.
That’s gone. Google removed it. What she gets now is an AI-written answer Google assembles on the spot, and you had no direct say in what it said.
Here’s what happened, and what I’d do about it if it were my business.
What Google removed, and when
It happened in two steps, and most owners missed both.
On November 3, 2025, Google shut off the Q&A API — the plumbing that let businesses and marketing tools post and manage answers automatically. Almost nobody noticed, because almost nobody was touching the API directly.
On December 3, 2025, the Q&A section disappeared from public view. The questions customers had asked and the answers owners had written stopped showing on profiles.
Google announced it quietly through a developer changelog and never really explained why. If this is news to you, you’re in good company. Most of the owners I talk to around Henry County are still operating on the assumption that their Q&A answers are sitting on their profile doing work for them. They aren’t.
What replaced it: “Ask Maps”
On March 12, 2026, Google launched Ask Maps, a conversational feature running on its Gemini AI. By August it had rolled out to more than 150 countries.
Ask Maps does something fundamentally different from the old Q&A. Instead of showing a customer a list of questions other people asked and the answers you wrote, it lets them ask anything in plain language — are you wheelchair accessible?, can you get someone out today?, is there anything gluten-free on the menu? — and it writes an answer in real time.
Where does that answer come from? Google pulls from several places at once:
- Your Business Profile — description, categories, services, attributes, hours, photos, posts
- Your website — your page copy, your FAQ page, your structured data
- Your reviews — the actual words customers use when they describe you
- Other public information about your business around the web
Notice what’s missing from that list: a box where you type the answer you want customers to get.
The real change isn’t the feature. It’s the control.
It’s tempting to read this as Google retiring a minor feature most businesses barely used. I think that undersells it.
The Q&A section, for all its problems, was one of the last places in local search where you could write a sentence and have that exact sentence shown to a customer. You controlled the wording. If your pricing confused people, you explained it. If customers kept misreading a policy, you clarified it once and moved on.
That channel is closed. You now influence the answer instead of writing it.
And “influence” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Go back to the plumber. Say she really does run emergency calls after hours — but her website doesn’t mention it anywhere, her profile lists only “Plumbing Repair” under services, and three of her recent reviews happen to say she “got back to us the next morning.”
What answer do you think the AI is going to write?
It won’t lie. It’ll assemble the most plausible answer from what it can find, and what it can find says next morning. She loses the job at 9:40 on a Tuesday and never knows the call existed.
Now flip it. The competitor down Highway 81 has a page on his site called “Emergency & After-Hours Plumbing in Henry County,” his profile lists “Emergency Service” under services, and four of his reviews say some version of called at 11pm, he showed up. The AI has everything it needs to answer with confidence, so it does.
Same two businesses. Same actual service. Completely different outcome — decided by what each one had published for a machine to read.
This landed in a rough year for local search
The Q&A removal didn’t happen in a quiet stretch.
Google’s March 2026 core update specifically went after local search quality, and enforcement against Business Profile spam ramped up alongside it — with service-area businesses taking the worst of the suspensions. Between February and April, Google shipped three algorithm updates inside four weeks.
A lot of local businesses watched their rankings move this spring and never got an explanation. If your phone got quieter and you couldn’t figure out why, this cluster of changes is a reasonable place to start looking.
But the bigger shift underneath all of it is this: Google is moving from showing customers your listing to answering customers’ questions about you. Your profile is turning into a data source for an AI rather than a page a person reads.
That’s the part worth sitting with. Your Business Profile isn’t a listing you set up once anymore. It’s a feed.
Five things to do about it
None of this takes a marketing budget. It takes deciding to spend an afternoon on it.
1. Write down the ten questions you actually get asked.
Not the ones you think you should get — the real ones. How much does a typical job run? Do you charge for estimates? Do you take my insurance? How soon can you get here? Do you work Saturdays?
You already know these by heart. Write them down anyway. That list is the raw material for everything else.
2. Answer every one of them on your own website.
This is the highest-value thing on the list, and here’s my reasoning: Google features come and go. Your website is yours. Q&A existed for years and then didn’t. Ask Maps will change too. The one asset in this whole picture that you own outright is your own site.
Build a real FAQ page — not three generic questions, but the ten real ones, answered in plain language, in full sentences. Then go further and give the important ones their own page. “Emergency Plumbing in McDonough” as an actual page beats one line buried in an FAQ accordion, both for the AI and for the customer who lands on it.
Write answers that make sense out of context, because that’s how they’ll be read. “Yes — I run emergency calls 24/7 across Henry County, and there’s no after-hours surcharge before 10pm” is a usable answer. “24/7!” is not.
3. Fill out every field on your profile, then keep touching it.
Services, attributes, hours, holiday hours, categories, description, photos. An empty field is an answer you’ve declined to give. If there’s an attribute for something true about you — wheelchair accessible, veteran-owned, free estimates, appointment required — set it. That’s structured information Google can use with confidence, which makes it far likelier to end up in an answer than something it had to infer from your paragraphs.
And treat the profile as something you maintain, not something you finished. Post updates. Add photos. A profile that hasn’t moved in eighteen months tells Google something.
4. Get reviews that mention specifics.
Reviews now feed directly into the answers customers get about you, which changes what a good review even looks like. Five stars and “Great service!” is nice and nearly useless. “Came out Sunday morning for a burst pipe, fixed it in two hours, charged exactly what he quoted” is a review that can show up inside AI answers about your emergency availability, your speed, and whether your quotes hold.
You can’t script reviews and you shouldn’t try. But when you ask for one, you can ask a specific question — would you mind mentioning what I came out for? — instead of a generic “leave us a review.” The difference in what comes back is real.
5. Add structured data to your site.
This one’s technical, and it’s where most local sites fall down. Schema markup — LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Service — is a standardized way of labeling your information so a machine reads it as fact instead of guessing from your sentences. It’s the difference between Google inferring your hours from a paragraph and Google knowing your hours because you declared them in a format built for the purpose.
If you’re on a website builder there may be a plugin for it. If your site was custom-built, whoever built it can add it. Either way it’s a one-time job that keeps paying.
The opening this leaves you
Here’s why I think this is good news if you move on it.
Almost nobody around here has done any of it. Drive down Jonesboro Road and look up ten businesses you pass. Most will have a thin profile, a website with no FAQ page, no structured data, and a handful of one-line reviews. When somebody in Hampton or Locust Grove asks Google a specific question about any of them, Google is going to build the best answer it can out of very little.
Which means the bar to being the business with the confident, complete, favorable answer is low right now. Not zero — it’s real work — but low. That’s a window, and windows close. Two years from now, when every HVAC company in the county has a proper FAQ page and a full profile, this is table stakes instead of an edge.
The businesses that move on it now get to be the answer for a while.
Where to start
Pick one thing: write the ten questions down. Everything else follows from that list, and it takes twenty minutes.
If you want to know where you stand before you start, grab a free 30-minute call with me. I’ll look up your business the way a customer would — on Google, in Maps, in ChatGPT — and show you what’s coming back about you right now. Sometimes the answer is “you’re in better shape than you thought,” and I’ll tell you so.
Either way, you’ll know what Google is saying about you. Which is more than most business owners can say today.
— Kris
Kris Miller runs KM Web Works, a web design, local SEO, and AI automation studio in McDonough, serving Henry County and the surrounding area. Reach me at kris@kmwebworks.com.