15 Sep Google Quietly Retired Business Profile Q&A. Here Is Where Your Answers Need to Live Now.
If you have been using the Questions and Answers section on your Google Business Profile, go look at your listing. The Q&A feature is gone. Google removed it from profiles this summer, and the programmatic access that tools used to manage it now returns errors.
We noticed because managing GBP Q&A was part of our monthly routine for local-service clients. We seeded common questions, posted owner answers, and monitored for customer questions that deserved a fast response. In August, that workflow stopped working across every profile we manage. No announcement banner, no migration path, just gone.
Here is the direct answer to the question that matters: the questions your customers were asking did not go away. Only Google’s box for them did. Your answers now need to live on your own website, in a form both humans and Google’s AI systems can read. This post covers what changed, why we think it happened, and what we are doing about it for our clients.
Why Google would remove a feature businesses used
We can only read the signals, but the signals are consistent. Google’s AI features now answer questions directly. When someone asks whether a pediatric practice takes same-day appointments or whether an HVAC company services their county, AI Overviews and AI Mode assemble the answer from the business’s website, its Business Profile data, and its reviews. A separate, lightly moderated Q&A section, where anyone could post an answer to a question about your business, was a liability in that system, not an asset. Anyone who managed GBP Q&A for long enough saw strangers answering questions incorrectly on businesses’ behalf.
The rest of the Business Profile matters more than ever, not less. Google’s own AI optimization guidance says its AI experiences use Business Profile information to respond to queries about local businesses. Categories, services, hours, service areas, photos, and reviews feed directly into whether Google’s AI recommends you. We wrote about that shift in July, and nothing about the Q&A retirement changes it. What changed is where written questions and answers belong.
What we are doing for our clients
Moving every worthwhile Q&A onto the client’s website. The questions we seeded on GBP came from real customer conversations, which means they are exactly the questions AI systems get asked. Each client’s best questions are becoming a genuine FAQ section on the relevant service page, written in the business’s own voice, with the kind of specific answers a generic site would not have. Not a wall of keyword bait. Five to ten questions customers actually ask, answered plainly.
Marking those FAQs up properly. Where an FAQ section genuinely exists on a page, we add FAQ structured data so search engines can parse the questions cleanly. To be clear about something we are frequently asked: structured data is not a magic AI visibility trick, and Google says plainly that no special schema exists for AI features. It remains the standard, correct way to describe an FAQ to a search engine, so we use it for that.
Auditing the rest of the profile harder. With Q&A gone, the remaining GBP surfaces carry more weight each. We verify categories and services quarterly, keep photos current, and treat review responses as a ranking input, because review engagement is one of the clearest signals a business can still control.
What you should do if you managed your own Q&A
If you never saved what was posted there, it is likely unrecoverable now, and that is the lesson worth keeping: content you build on a platform you do not own can vanish without notice. It happened to Q&A this year. It has happened to other Google features before, and it will happen again.
The durable move is the same one we recommend everywhere: put your answers on the one property you own, your website, and let Google’s systems read them from there. Your website is the source AI answers get grounded in. Rented surfaces come and go.
If you are not sure which questions belong on your site, start with the last ten calls your front desk answered. The things people phone you to ask are the things they are now asking AI. Write those answers down, put them on the page for that service, and you have replaced the Q&A box with something better than what Google took away.
Need help figuring out what your customers are asking AI about you? That is literally our job. Get in touch and we will show you.