GBP Q&A Is Gone. Ask Maps Answers Your Customers Now
If you opened your Google Business Profile recently and could not find the Questions & Answers section, you did not lose it in a settings menu. Google quietly deprecated the Q&A API in late 2025 and has been removing the public Q&A block from profiles ever since. For most contractors in 2026 it is simply gone from Maps and Search.
In its place, Google now shows an "Ask Maps" prompt. A homeowner types a question about your business directly into Google Maps, and an AI writes the answer on the spot. There is no queue of questions for you to answer, no notification, and no owner-written reply that gets shown first. The AI decides what to say, every time, in real time.
That is the part contractors need to sit with. For years, the Q&A section was a place you could seed the ten questions you answer on every phone call and write the answers yourself. That control is gone. What replaced it is a system that reads about your business and paraphrases. Your job now is to make sure what it reads is complete, current, and yours. Search Engine Roundtable documented the switch when it began rolling out; you can read the original report on the Q&A to Ask Maps change for the timeline.
Where Ask Maps Gets Its Answers (Including Sites You Don't Control)
Ask Maps does not invent facts from nothing. It assembles an answer from a short list of sources, and knowing that list is the whole game. In our testing across contractor profiles in the Okanagan and beyond, the answers trace back to five places:
- Your Google Business Profile fields. Business description, services list, categories, attributes, hours, and service area. This is the source the AI trusts most because Google owns it.
- Your reviews and your replies to them. When a homeowner asks "do they do emergency work?", the AI is happy to quote a review that says "they came out at 9pm on a Sunday." Your owner replies count too.
- Your website. Service pages, FAQ pages, and pricing pages get pulled in when the profile itself does not answer the question.
- Your photos and their captions. A photo labelled "metal roof installation, Vernon" is evidence you install metal roofs.
- Third-party sites. Yelp, HomeStars, Facebook, BBB, directory listings, and old Reddit threads. This is the source you control least, and it is where wrong answers usually come from.
Notice what is not on that list: the Q&A answers you wrote in 2023. Google says existing Q&A content "may" still inform Maps, but in practice we have not seen a single case where a seeded answer was quoted back. Treat that content as archived. The same logic applies to the AI assistants like ChatGPT that recommend contractors: the model answers from whatever public text it can find, and the business with the clearest public text wins.
The 6 Fixes That Shape What Ask Maps Says About You
Every one of these takes under an hour, and together they cover the questions homeowners actually ask. Do them in order. The first three fix the profile the AI reads first; the last three fix what it falls back on.
1. Rewrite Your Business Description to Answer Questions, Not Sell
Most contractor descriptions are a paragraph of adjectives. Rewrite yours as plain statements of fact: what you do, where you do it, who you serve, how long you have been doing it, and what you do not do. "We install and repair asphalt, metal, and cedar roofs for homeowners in Vernon, Kelowna, and Lake Country. Family owned since 2009. We do not do commercial flat roofing." That last sentence matters. A clear "no" stops the AI from guessing "yes."
2. List Every Service You Offer as a Separate Service Item
The Services section of your profile is the AI's first stop for "do they do X?" questions. If you offer twelve services and list four, the AI will say "it's unclear whether they offer gutter guards" or, worse, pull a wrong answer from a competitor-adjacent directory. Add each service with a two-sentence description. This is the same fix we flagged as the most common problem in our audit of GBP mistakes costing contractors leads, and Ask Maps has made it more expensive to skip.
3. Fill Every Attribute, Especially the Ones That Answer Yes/No Questions
Attributes are structured yes/no data, which is exactly what an AI prefers. Free estimates, licensed, insured, veteran-owned, wheelchair accessible, online estimates, emergency service, languages spoken. Each one you leave blank is a question the AI has to guess at. Each one you fill is a question it answers correctly with confidence.
4. Reply to Reviews With the Facts Customers Ask About
Your review replies are indexed text that the AI reads. Stop writing "Thanks so much, Karen!" and start writing replies that carry information: "Thanks Karen. That was a full tear-off and re-shingle on a 2,400 square foot home in Coldstream, finished in two days as quoted." Now the AI has evidence for project size, location, timeline, and pricing honesty, all in your own words. It also gives future customers something worth reading, which is the same reason review volume matters in the first place.
5. Build a Real FAQ Page on Your Website With FAQ Schema
This is where your old seeded Q&A content should live now. Take the ten questions you answer on every sales call, write direct two-to-four sentence answers, and publish them on a page with FAQPage structured data. When the profile does not answer a question, the AI goes to your site, and a schema-marked FAQ page is the easiest thing on the internet for it to quote. If your site is a five-year-old template with no FAQ, that is a website problem before it is a Maps problem.
6. Fix Your Hours, Service Area, and Phone Number Everywhere
"Are they open Saturday?" and "do they service Armstrong?" are the two most common Ask Maps questions we see for trades. If your profile says one thing and your Facebook page says another, the AI hedges or picks wrong. Audit the top ten directories your business appears on and make the hours, service area, and phone number match your profile exactly.
Not Sure What Ask Maps Is Telling Your Customers?
Book a free strategy call. We'll run the questions your customers ask against your profile, show you every wrong or missing answer, and fix the profile so the AI gets it right.
→ Book Free Strategy CallWhat You Can No Longer Do, and What to Do Instead
A few Q&A-era tactics are dead, and it is worth being explicit so nobody on your team keeps doing them.
Seeding your own questions. You cannot post a question to your profile and answer it anymore. The replacement is the website FAQ page above, plus fact-carrying review replies. Same content, different home.
Upvoting the right answer. There is no answer to upvote. The replacement is making sure the correct fact appears in more than one source: profile, website, and at least one review reply. Repetition across sources is how you outvote a wrong third-party listing.
Flagging a bad customer answer. Customers cannot write answers anymore either, which removes one headache. But you also cannot flag an AI answer for removal. If Ask Maps says something wrong about your business, the only fix is to change the source it pulled from. Ask yourself which of the five sources above contains the wrong fact, correct it there, and check again in a couple of weeks.
Getting notified of new questions. Nothing notifies you when a homeowner asks Ask Maps about your business. The replacement is a monthly manual check, which is the next section.
One thing that did not change: none of this directly moves your position in the map pack. Ask Maps shapes what customers learn once they find you, not whether they find you. Ranking is still driven by relevance, distance, and prominence, which we break down in our map pack ranking guide. But a profile that answers questions well converts more of the people who do find you, and the same completeness signals that help Ask Maps are ranking signals too.
How to Test What Ask Maps Says About You Right Now
This takes fifteen minutes and you should do it before changing anything, so you have a baseline. Open Google Maps on your phone, search your business name, and open your listing. Look for the "Ask Maps" or "Ask about this place" prompt. Then ask it the five questions you hear most on the phone. For most contractors that list looks like:
- Do they offer free estimates?
- Do they service [the town at the edge of your area]?
- Are they licensed and insured?
- How much does a typical [your main job] cost?
- Do they do emergency or after-hours work?
Write down each answer word for word. Mark it right, wrong, or "unclear." Then trace every wrong or unclear answer back to its source using the list in the second section. In our experience the split is roughly a third profile gaps, a third website gaps, and a third stale third-party listings. Fix the profile gaps first because those changes show up fastest.
Repeat the test monthly and after any change to your services or service area. Put it on the same calendar as your review requests and your monthly profile maintenance. It is the closest thing you have to the notification Google took away, and it is the only way to catch a wrong answer before a hundred homeowners hear it.