If you've gone looking for the "Ask a question" button on your Google Business Profile recently and couldn't find it, that's not a glitch. Google has retired the traditional Q&A feature. The API that allowed businesses and third-party tools to manage it was switched off on 3 November 2025, and Google has replaced the old user-generated question-and-answer section with AI-generated answers, drawn together on the fly when someone asks about your business. So the honest answer to "how do I use GBP Q&A" is: you don't, not in the way guides from a year or two ago describe. What you can do is control the information that Google's AI pulls from when it answers questions on your behalf.
What's replaced the old Q&A section
Google now handles questions about local businesses through an AI-powered experience, sometimes referred to as "Ask Maps" or AI-driven contextual answers, built on models from Google's Gemini family. Instead of a customer posting "do you offer free parking?" and waiting for the business or another user to reply, Google's AI now reads across your Google Business Profile, your website, and your reviews to generate an answer itself, often instantly.
This is a meaningful shift, not a cosmetic one. There's no longer a visible list of questions and answers sitting on your listing that you can seed, edit, or upvote. The "section" has effectively dissolved into the broader pool of information Google already uses to understand your business.
What this means for AI Overviews and local search
Google has been testing and rolling out AI-generated summaries directly inside local Knowledge Panels, alongside the more conversational AI Overviews that now appear across ordinary search results. For a local business, this means a customer searching your business name, or searching something like "best plumber open now near me," may see an AI-written summary of who you are and what you offer before they see anything written by you directly.
Google has publicly stated that it recommends keeping Business Profile information current for AI Overviews and AI Mode to work well. That's a documented position from Google itself, worth taking seriously. What's less certain, and comes from SEO practitioners observing results rather than from Google's own documentation, is exactly how much weight any single input carries, or how consistently these AI summaries behave from one search to the next. Treat practitioner observations as useful direction, not fixed rules.
Where Google's AI actually gets its answers
When someone asks a question about your business, the AI isn't inventing an answer from nothing. It's synthesising one from sources it can already see. Based on how Google has described this shift, and how practitioners have observed it working, three sources matter most.
Your Google Business Profile
Your business description, categories, services, attributes, opening hours, photos, and posts all feed into this picture. A profile with gaps, or one that hasn't been touched in months, gives the AI less to work with and more room to get things wrong. If you haven't reviewed your profile properly in a while, our guide on what a small Google Business Profile audit should actually check is a sensible place to start.
Your website
Service pages, pricing information, opening hours, and genuine FAQ content on your own site now carry more weight than they did when GBP Q&A existed as a separate channel. If a customer used to ask "do you work weekends?" via Q&A, that answer now needs to live somewhere Google's AI can read it: ideally a clear, well-written FAQ section or service page on your website.
Reviews, including on other platforms
Customer reviews, particularly ones that mention specific services, prices, or circumstances, appear to feed into how Google's AI describes and justifies a business in search results. This isn't confirmed by Google as a formal ranking mechanism, but it's a consistent pattern practitioners have reported, and it fits with the general direction Google has taken toward drawing on real customer language rather than business self-description alone.
Practical steps for UK businesses
Because there's no longer a Q&A box to fill in directly, the work shifts upstream to the sources feeding the AI. A few actions are worth prioritising.
Start by auditing your profile and website together, rather than treating them as separate jobs. Check that your business description, services list, categories, and attributes on your profile are complete and match what's actually on your website. Inconsistencies between the two, different opening hours listed on each, for example, are exactly the kind of thing that can lead an AI summary astray.
Build out a proper FAQ section on your website if you don't already have one. Think about the questions customers genuinely ask before booking or visiting: pricing ranges, what's included, how to book, accessibility, parking, payment methods, service area. Answer them clearly and in full sentences rather than one-word fragments, since this content may end up being read and summarised by AI systems, not just by human visitors.
Keep asking customers for reviews, and don't be afraid to prompt them gently toward specifics ("let us know which service you used and how it went") rather than a generic star rating alone. Respond to every review, positive or negative. This is good practice regardless of AI search, and it also gives Google more current, specific content to draw on.
Periodically search your own business name, and a handful of common customer questions, to see what Google's AI actually says about you. If something's wrong, trace it back: is the error coming from outdated information on your profile, your website, or a review? Correcting the source is the only reliable way to correct the output. If the AI appears to be generating something inaccurate despite your sources being correct, there's no direct reporting channel equivalent to the old Q&A moderation, but keeping your own data clean and current remains the best defence.
A note on structured data and schema markup
It's worth being clear on this point, because it's a common source of confusion: Google does not require special schema markup for a business to appear in AI Overviews or AI-generated local answers. Structured data can help search engines parse your website content more reliably in general, but adding FAQ schema or similar markup is not a documented requirement for AI visibility, and it certainly won't guarantee inclusion. The more reliable lever remains writing genuinely clear, accurate content, on your website and your profile, that answers real questions in plain language.
Google Business Profile matters, but it isn't the whole picture
It's tempting to treat your Google Business Profile as the single dial you can turn to control how AI search describes your business. It isn't. GBP completeness appears to support local visibility, and Google's own guidance backs keeping it current, but it sits alongside your website and your reviews as one of several inputs. A profile that's 100% complete but contradicted by an out-of-date website, or by reviews mentioning services you no longer offer, won't produce a reliably accurate AI summary.
What to focus on instead of trying to game it
There's no trick, prompt, or workaround that reliably manipulates what Google's AI says about a business, and chasing one is a poor use of time. The more durable approach is unglamorous: keep your profile complete and current, keep your website's service and FAQ content accurate and specific, keep collecting and responding to reviews, and periodically check what's actually being shown to customers so you can fix the source rather than the symptom. None of this guarantees a particular outcome in AI Overviews, because Google hasn't published the mechanics in that kind of detail, and practitioner observations should be read as informed patterns rather than fixed rules. But consistent, accurate, well-maintained information across your profile, your site, and your reviews gives Google's AI the best possible material to work with, and that's the only lever a business genuinely controls. If you'd rather have someone keep this maintained for you, our Google Business Profile support service covers exactly this kind of ongoing upkeep.