Google Removed Q&A from Your Business Profiles. Now AI Is Answering Your Customers With or Without You.

A customer pulls up your restaurant on Google Maps and asks: “Does this location have a drive-through?” Nobody on your team sees the question. Nobody answers it. Google’s AI does it instead, pulling from your profile, your reviews, your website, and whatever else it can find.

If any of that data is incomplete, inconsistent, or simply missing, the answer Google gives could be wrong. And it’s happening right now, at every one of your locations, simultaneously.

What Google Changed and When

In November 2025, Google officially discontinued the My Business Q&A API. The familiar Q&A section began disappearing from profiles across the board. By early 2026, the feature had been phased out of the majority of Business Profiles globally.

For years, savvy multi-location brands had used Q&A strategically, seeding their own questions, answering them accurately, and using the section to pre-empt bad leads, set correct expectations, and control the narrative at each location. That lever is gone.

The New Answer Engine: Gemini Fills the Gap

In place of the Q&A box, Google is rolling out AI-powered conversational answers through the Ask Maps experience, powered by Gemini. When a customer asks a natural language question about your location, Gemini synthesises a response from multiple sources:

• Your Google Business Profile fields: categories, services, attributes, hours, amenities, posts
• Customer reviews: sentiment, keywords, recurring themes
• Your website, especially FAQ pages marked up with structured data
• Third-party mentions and citation sources

The critical shift is control. Previously, if a wrong answer appeared in Q&A, you could correct it directly. Now, if Gemini generates an incorrect answer, you have to fix the underlying source data and wait for Google to re-synthesise.

Why Franchise Scale Changes Everything

Google’s AI does not assess your brand. It assesses each profile independently. A profile with incomplete service attributes can generate a vague or incorrect AI answer. A location with thin review volume will give Gemini very little to work with.

Multiply that across a network and the compounding risk is significant. One hundred locations with stale profiles means one hundred potential points of failure.

The Three Data Gaps That Generate Wrong Answers

1. Incomplete profile attributes. Google uses attributes to answer highly specific questions. At many franchise locations, these are either untouched or inconsistently applied across the network.

2. Review signal gaps. Gemini pulls heavily from reviews to understand what a location is actually like. Locations with low review volume provide weak signal.

3. No FAQ schema on location pages. Structured FAQ content on your website, specifically pages with FAQPage schema markup, is now one of the clearest ways to feed Gemini accurate answers. This is particularly important on a local level.

How Social Places Helps Multi-Location Brands Take Back Control

Keeping attributes accurate across every profile, ensuring trading hours and service offerings are up to date, and supporting a review strategy that builds the signal Gemini needs. These are not tasks that can be handled manually across a large network. Social Places Listings gives multi-location brands a single platform to manage, update, and audit the profile data that AI engines now depend on.

The Q&A feature is gone. But the questions haven’t gone anywhere. Contact Us