If you ever answered questions on your Google Business Profile, that feature is gone. Google retired Q&A and replaced it with Ask Maps — a Gemini-powered AI that answers a searcher's questions about you in real time, pulling from your Business Profile, your reviews, your photos, and your website. The short version for agents: you no longer write the answers, your profile does.
According to Google's Business Profile documentation and reporting across the search industry, Google shut off the Q&A API on November 3, 2025 and began removing the public Q&A section from December 3, 2025. What replaced it arrived a few months later: industry reporting places the launch of Ask Maps in March 2026. The work moves from replying to questions to making sure the sources AI reads are complete, accurate, and yours.
What actually changed
For years, anyone could post a public question on your profile, and anyone — including you — could answer it. That thread is being retired. Now, when someone asks "do they handle relocations?" or "who's good with first-time buyers here?", Gemini generates an answer on the spot from whatever it can read about you, not from a Q&A you curated. Google's stated reasoning, as reported by search-industry outlets: the old Q&A had grown noisy, outdated, and unmoderated.
Why this hits agents harder than most businesses
A restaurant's Ask Maps answers are about parking and patios. Yours are about trust and judgment — the exact things a buyer or seller weighs before they call. And Ask Maps reads the same signals that decide whether ChatGPT or Perplexity recommend you: your profile, your reviews, your website. Get them right once and the same signals work for you across Google AI, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Leave them thin and an AI is now improvising answers about your business with no input from you.
The four things that feed Ask Maps — so get them right
- A complete, accurate Business Profile. Categories, service areas, hours, services, attributes — every field is a fact the AI can use. Blank fields make blank answers.
- Reviews are answer fuel now. Ask Maps pulls substance straight from your reviews. Ones that name what you actually did — "walked us through our first purchase," "sold our place over asking" — become the AI's evidence. If you've got a handful of bare five-stars, that's the first gap to close.
- A website AI can read. Ask Maps reaches to your site for specifics. A brokerage profile page with no schema and no real content gives it nothing to pull. A site you own, marked up so machines can read it, is what gets cited.
- Content that answers the real questions. The questions people used to type into Q&A, they now ask the AI. Answer them plainly on your site and in your profile, and you become the source it quotes.
Do this week
Open your Business Profile and fill every empty field. Read your last ten reviews and notice how thin or thick they are on specifics — then ask your next three happy clients for a review that names what you did. And find out what AI already says about you: get a free AI Visibility Score and I'll show you how you show up across Google AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and exactly where the gaps are.
The shift is bigger than one retired feature. Google just said, as plainly as it gets, that AI now answers for your business whether you take part or not. The agents who feed it well get answered well — one of mine did exactly this (complete profile, machine-readable reviews, a site built to be read) and had an AI-sourced lead in 18 days. The deeper breakdown of every signal AI reads is in the AI visibility FAQ.
Sources: Google Business Profile Help; reporting from search-engine outlets and Glenn Gabe / GSQI (2025–2026). Dates and behavior described above (Q&A API discontinued Nov 3, 2025; public Q&A removal from Dec 3, 2025; Ask Maps launched March 2026; Google's stated rationale) reflect that industry reporting.