For years, the Questions and Answers section was one of the quieter tools on a Google Business Profile. A customer could ask "Do you have parking?" or "Are you open on holidays?" right on your listing, and anyone — including you — could answer. Smart owners used it as a free FAQ, seeding the questions they got asked all day and answering them before a customer ever had to call.
That version of Q&A is gone. Google discontinued the classic Questions and Answers feature and shut down its supporting API on November 3, 2025, replacing it with AI-driven answers, an experience often called "Ask Maps". But the instinct that made Q&A useful — anticipating the questions customers actually ask, and answering them clearly — matters more now, not less. This is about where those answers belong today.
What the Q&A section was, and what changed
The old Q&A section appeared right in your listing on Search and Maps. Anyone with a Google account could post a question or an answer, owners could ask and answer their own to build a running FAQ, and useful entries could be upvoted to the top. It was community-run: you could not switch it off, only monitor it and report anything that broke Google's content rules.
As of late 2025, that public thread has been removed from profiles, and businesses can no longer manually add or manage questions. In its place, when someone asks a question in Search or Maps, Google now generates an answer in real time using your profile, your website, and your reviews. You may still spot leftover Q&A entries in some Maps views, and Google Maps keeps a limited surface for reporting or answering questions about a place — but the days of curating your own on-profile FAQ are over.
The FAQ instinct still wins
Here is the part that has not changed. Customers still walk up with the same handful of questions: what it costs, whether you take walk-ins, if there is parking, what your cancellation policy is, whether you serve their specific need.
The old move was to answer those in the Q&A box. The new move is to answer them everywhere Google actually reads — because Google's AI now pulls its answers from your website content, your Business Profile fields, and your reviews instead of a curated Q&A list. Sit down once and write out the ten or fifteen questions you get asked most. That list is still the most valuable thing you can build. What changed is only where you put the answers.
