August 31, 2026 / digital-marketing, local-seo, seo, utah-business
Google Business Profile Q&A Is Gone: Where Answers Live Now
Google discontinued Business Profile Q&A and stopped showing FAQ rich results in 2026. Both places small businesses published answers are closed. Here is where they go now.
The two places your answers used to live
For most of the past decade, a small business had two free and reliable places to publish an answer to a question customers kept asking. One was the Questions and answers section on your Google Business Profile, where you could post the question yourself and answer it. The other was an FAQ block on your own website, marked up with FAQPage structured data so Google would show those questions directly inside your search result.
Both are closed. Not gradually, and not quietly if you were reading Google's changelogs. If you last thought about either of these in 2024, your mental model of how customers get answers about your business is now two features out of date.
This post is narrow on purpose. Our local SEO guide covers what moves the map pack overall, and our AI search post covers whether assistants can cite your business at all. This one is only about questions and answers: what Google removed, what replaced it, and where those answers belong now.
What Google actually did, with dates
The Business Profile side went first. Google's Q&A API change log posted the notice on September 15, 2025, saying the My Business Q&A API would be discontinued "as we are in the process of updating the Q&A functionality and user experience." The entry dated November 3, 2025 confirms it happened: the API was discontinued, and you can no longer read or post questions and answers through it.
That is the developer-facing half. The customer-facing half is easier to check, and I checked it this morning. Google's Maps help page for the feature is now titled Answer questions about a place on Google Maps. It used to be ask and answer. Today the page explains how to answer an existing question and how to report one, and there is no longer an instruction anywhere on it for asking a new one. The asking half is gone from Google's own documentation, which is a cleaner signal than any industry rumor.
The website side went second, and Google was blunter about it. The Search Central documentation updates log records the deprecation notice on May 8, 2026, with the reason stated plainly: the FAQ rich result "will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026." A June 2026 entry then removed the documentation entirely, noting the feature is no longer shown in search results at all.
There is a small piece of symmetry worth noticing. Google announced FAQ structured data on May 8, 2019. The deprecation notice landed on May 8, 2026. Seven years to the day, and most of that shelf life was already spent, because the August 2023 change had already restricted FAQ rich results to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites." If you run a boarding kennel in Salt Lake City, that result stopped showing for you three years ago. May 2026 only made it official.
What replaced the Q&A box
Google announced Ask Maps on March 12, 2026, a conversational layer built on Gemini that answers questions about places. It began rolling out in the United States and India on Android and iOS, and Google's help documentation now covers it on computer, Android, and iPhone. In that announcement Google describes drawing on more than 300 million places and a community of more than 500 million contributors.
Read that carefully, because it describes a change in who writes the answer.
Under the old feature, a customer asked a question, you wrote a reply, and it sat there attributed to you. It was slow, it was gamed constantly by businesses seeding their own questions, and it was yours. Under the new one, a model composes an answer on demand from your profile fields, your reviews, your photos, and whatever it can read on your website. You do not write the answer anymore. You supply the inputs and something else does the writing.
Why this matters more than it sounds
It is tempting to file this under minor feature churn. For a local service business it is not, because the Business Profile is frequently the highest converting surface you own and the one you control least.
That is a real figure from a real client, and it is why I pay attention to this. Those calls did not come from a blog post. They came from somebody who needed boarding, found accurate information quickly, and dialed the number on the profile. Every question that used to get answered in a Q&A box was a small piece of that path. Now those questions get answered by a synthesis you did not write, assembled from sources you can only influence indirectly.
Do not rip out your FAQ markup
The most common overreaction I expect to see this year is a business owner paying a developer to strip FAQPage structured data out of a site. Do not bother.
Google addressed this directly back in 2023 and the guidance still holds: you can drop the structured data if you want, but there is no need to proactively remove it, because structured data that is not being used does not cause problems for Search. Removing it is billable hours spent on nothing.
What you should stop doing is paying for it. If a proposal on your desk includes "FAQ schema for rich results" as a line item, that deliverable no longer exists. The rich result it promises has not been shown to ordinary business websites since 2023 and has not been shown to anyone since May 2026. It belongs in the same category as the llms.txt file we covered in the AI search post, which Google has since stated in its own documentation is not needed for Search and neither helps nor hurts your visibility.
Where the answers actually go now
Four places, in the order I would work on them.
Onto the page the customer is already reading. If people keep asking whether you take same day appointments, that sentence belongs in the body copy of the relevant service page, written as a plain statement rather than buried in a collapsed block at the bottom. Collapsed blocks are fine as long as the text ships in the HTML. Answers assembled by JavaScript after the page loads are a different story, and that failure mode is covered in our post on what crawlers can actually read.
Into the profile fields Google still gives you. Services, attributes, the business description, regular and special hours, and photos are all structured inputs that survived the Q&A removal. Holiday hours are the single most common miss, and they answer the question people ask most often at exactly the moment they are ready to buy.
Into your reviews, indirectly and legally. Google says its answers draw on that contributor community, which means customer language is now feedstock. Asking a happy customer to mention what they came in for is legitimate. Incentivizing, gating, or filtering reviews is not, and the specifics of what crosses the line are in the review section of our Salt Lake City local SEO post.
Into a genuine answers page, written for people. Keep the schema if it is already there. Write the page as though no rich result will ever come of it, because none will. Its value now is that it is the clearest available source for anything summarizing your business.
What I would do this month
- Open your Business Profile and check whether stale Q&A content is still visible. Read it the way a customer would, and remove anything wrong or out of date while removal is still possible.
- Write down the five questions your phone actually answers most often. Not the ones you wish people asked. The real five.
- Find each of those five answers on your website. If an answer does not exist in the HTML of a page, put it there this week.
- Fill in special hours through the end of the year. It takes ten minutes and it is the highest value blank field on most profiles.
- Read your last twenty reviews and ask whether they describe what you actually do. If they all say "great service," your review corpus is not telling any model anything useful, and that is a request wording problem rather than a review count problem.
None of that requires a retainer, and the first four are free.
Frequently asked questions
My profile still shows old Q&A content. Is that a problem? Only if the content is wrong. Existing entries have lingered on some profiles even though nothing new can be added. Treat it as legacy copy you inherited: read it once, remove anything inaccurate, and do not plan around it.
Should I delete FAQPage structured data from my site? No. Google's own guidance is that unused structured data causes no problems for Search, so removing it is cost without benefit. Just stop treating it as a visibility tactic.
If a model writes the answer, can I correct it when it is wrong? Not directly, which is the uncomfortable part. Your leverage is the inputs: accurate profile fields, clear website copy, and reviews that describe the actual service. When an answer comes out wrong, the cause is almost always a thin or contradictory source somewhere in that set, and finding it is ordinary detective work rather than a support ticket.
Does any of this change my rankings? Not by itself. This is a distribution change rather than a ranking change. Pages and profile fields that were already accurate get read and summarized. The ones that were vague were never doing much for you and now do even less.
The pattern here is one we keep running into. A free surface you used to write on turns into a surface that reads you instead, and the work shifts from posting to being legible. If you want a second set of eyes on whether your profile and site would survive that reading, our digital marketing team will run the five questions exercise above with you and tell you which answers are missing.