Last Updated on August 20, 2026
What just happened
Google has switched off the Questions and Answers section on Business Profiles. That was the box on your Google listing where a customer could ask something like “do you take card?” or “is there parking?” and you, the owner, could type a straight answer.
Google confirmed the removal on 3 November 2025 and pulled the public section down from early December. It has not brought it back.
In its place, Google now writes the answers itself. When someone asks a question about your business, Gemini, Google’s AI, puts together a reply from whatever it can find: your website, your reviews, your listing details, and other mentions of you online.
Why this matters for your business
The old Q&A box was clumsy, but it was yours. You could correct a wrong answer. You could seed the common questions and reply to them in your own words.
That control has gone. Google is now the one answering, and it is only as accurate as the information it can find about you.
So if your website is thin, your opening hours are out of date in one place, or your reviews mention a problem you fixed two years ago, that is the raw material Google is using to speak for you. You do not see the answer being written. You just live with the result.
This is the same pattern showing up everywhere in search. The customer gets an answer without visiting your site, and the business has less say in what that answer is.
The mistake most owners will make
The reflex is to panic about the feature itself. Owners will go looking for a workaround, a plugin, a clever way to get the old box back.
That is the wrong fight. The box is not coming back. The real issue is that Google now builds your answer from your foundations, and most businesses have never checked those foundations.
You cannot control the AI. You can control what it reads.
What to do about it
Put the answers on your own website. List your real questions, the ones customers actually ask, and answer them in plain words on your site. Prices, parking, delivery, returns, booking, timings. This is the material Google pulls from. If it is not written down somewhere you own, Google is guessing.
Make your details match everywhere. Name, address, phone, and hours should be identical on your website, your Google profile, and any directory you appear in. Mismatched details are how AI produces a wrong answer with full confidence.
Read your reviews as source material, not just feedback. Google now mines them for answers. A calm, factual reply to an old complaint is not just good manners, it is you correcting the record the AI reads from.
Pass video verification while you are at it. Google now leans on video verification to confirm a profile is genuine, and unverified profiles get quietly held back. It is a short recording of your premises done through the app. Do it once and it is behind you.
The takeaway
You have lost the right to answer your own customers on Google. You have not lost the ability to decide what Google reads before it answers for you. Fix your website, your listings, and your reviews so the machine has good material to work with. That is structure before scale, and it is the only part of this you still control.
