Google closed your profile's question box. An AI answers now.

What Google turned off

Google closed a box on your Google Business Profile at the end of last year, and most owners never noticed. It was the Questions and Answers section. That was the box where anyone could post a question about your business, and you (or honestly a stranger) could type an answer. It's gone now. In its place, when a customer asks a question about you inside Google Maps, an AI writes the answer instead of you.

Here is the timeline, as local-search trade press like PPC Land and Search Engine Journal reported it. Google announced the end of the Questions and Answers tool in September 2025. The connection behind it was switched off on November 3, 2025. The public question box started coming off profiles on December 3, 2025, and the removal rolled out over the next one to three months. Those dates come from trade coverage rather than a formal Google announcement, so read them as close rather than exact. The direction is firm. The question box is gone.

What replaced it is called the Ask feature (part of what Google named Ask Maps). In plain words, it's the new AI answer inside Google Maps, where a customer types a full question and Google's AI writes back. That AI is Google's model (they call it Gemini). A customer taps Ask, types something like "do you take my insurance," and the AI answers about your business in a sentence or two. You never see the question, and you never get to write the reply. No login. No draft.

What the AI reads to answer for you

The AI builds its answer from three things you already have: your Google profile, your reviews, and your website. Those are the only places it looks. So the answer a new customer sees is only as good as what those three sources actually say.

One detail matters more than owners expect. The AI reads the full written text of your reviews, every word, along with the star count. The exact words your customers wrote can become part of the answer. When someone wrote "came same day" or "took my insurance" or "good with nervous kids," those words can land in the reply a stranger reads. The star rating still matters, and now the written words matter too.

This is running across Google Maps at full scale. Google has said its Maps AI draws on information about more than 300 million places and reviews from more than 500 million people. That's Google's own number for Maps as a whole (not a measure of your one business). Still, it tells you the AI answer is where many customers now meet you first.

Say a customer asks whether you work weekends. The AI checks your profile hours first. If the weekend rows are blank, it looks through your reviews for a line like "came out on a Sunday," and then at your website. If none of the three say it, the AI stays vague or tells the customer you're closed. A blank field reads as a no, even when you really do work weekends.

Here is what changed for you as an owner. For years, a careful owner could watch that Questions and Answers box, answer the common questions in their own words, and fix anything wrong a stranger posted. That hands-on control is gone. Now the AI just reads whatever your profile, your reviews, and your site happen to say, and writes an answer from that. It never asks your permission and never shows you a draft.

So think about what happens when the sources are thin. If your profile is half empty, if your reviews never mention the service someone asks about, or if your site never answers the question in plain words, the AI fills the gap. It gives a vague reply, or it leans on a competitor that did answer. You can't log in and correct it after the fact. The only thing you still control is what those three sources say before the customer ever asks.

The 15-minute job

Here is today's move, and it costs nothing. Write down the ten questions customers ask you on the phone every week. Then make sure each answer is written somewhere the AI can read it. That's the whole task. About fifteen minutes.

Start with the questions you already answer twenty times a week:

1. Do you take my insurance, or what does it cost?
2. How fast can you come out?
3. Do you handle this exact problem?
4. What are your hours, and are you open weekends?
5. Which areas do you cover?

Write your real ten, in the plain words customers use. Then, for each one, check the three sources. Is the answer filled into your Google profile? Does a recent review from a customer mention it? Can someone find it in plain words on a page of your website? Wherever the answer is missing, add it. Put your prices or price ranges on the site in text. Fill in your hours and service areas on the profile. Answer the common questions on a page, in the words people actually type into their phone. Keep each answer short and plain, two or three sentences, the way you would say it out loud to a caller.

One honest warning before you start. Don't write fake reviews, and don't stuff phrases into reviews yourself. That breaks Google's rules, and it's dishonest. The real move is to answer the questions truthfully in your profile and on your site, and to keep asking happy customers for genuine reviews and replying to them.

Check what the AI says about you

After you add the missing answers, do one more thing. Open Google Maps on your phone, find your business, tap Ask, and type one of your ten questions the way a customer would. Read what the AI says back. If it's vague or wrong, you now know which of the three sources is still missing that answer. Give a fresh edit a week or two to get read, then ask again.

This is the new shape of a first impression for a service business. A customer used to call and hear your voice. Now many of them ask Google first, and an AI answers for you from your profile, your reviews, and your site. You lost the button that let you answer by hand. What you kept is the source material, and writing the real answers into those three places is enough to steer what a new customer hears.