Google Business Profile Q&A Has Gone and Ask Maps Isn't in the UK Yet: What to Do Now
If you used to answer customers' questions on your Google Business Profile, you will have noticed the section has gone or is going. Google switched off the Q&A API on 3 November 2025, and the public Q&A panel has been disappearing from profiles since. In its place, in some countries, is Ask Maps: a Gemini-powered chat inside Google Maps that answers customers' questions about a business for you. The UK isn't one of those countries yet. For a London business that gap is useful, because it leaves time to get the information Ask Maps will read in order before it arrives.
What changed, and when
Google announced the end of the Business Profile Q&A API on 15 September 2025 and switched it off on 3 November 2025, according to its Q&A API change log. Since then nobody, owner or software, can post answers through the API, and the notifications that told you a new question had arrived were retired the same day. The public Q&A box has been phased out of profiles over the months since. Timing has varied, and a few profiles still show old questions, but you can no longer count on writing your own answers there.
On 12 March 2026 Google launched Ask Maps, which it called the biggest change to Google Maps in over a decade. Instead of scrolling a list of questions, a customer types something like "does this place have step-free access?" or "which plumber near me does weekend boiler repairs?" and Gemini writes the answer. It launched on Android and iOS in the US and India and has since reached Australia, and in the US Google has added food ordering and hotel search. Google hasn't announced a UK date. If someone tells you they are optimising your business for Ask Maps in the UK today, ask what they are measuring, because there is nothing live here to measure.
Why losing Q&A matters more than it looks
Q&A was the one part of your profile where you answered customers' real questions in your own words. From now on those answers will be written by Google's model, from whatever it can find about you. If the fact it needs is missing, it will either say it doesn't know or lean on a competitor whose profile and website answer the question plainly. The businesses that will come out well are the ones whose answers already sit in places the model can read.
Where Ask Maps gets its answers
Google hasn't published a full list of what Ask Maps reads. Its announcement talks about answers built from Maps' information about places and from reviews, and people testing it in the US report answers that draw on profile fields, review text and the business's own website. That is the same material Google already uses to rank local businesses: what your profile says you do, what customers say you did, and what your site explains in more detail. Our guide to how Google ranks local businesses covers how those three fit together.
Five things to do before Ask Maps reaches the UK
1. Rescue your old questions. If your profile still shows Q&A, copy the questions and answers into a document now. If it has gone, search your inbox for old "new question" emails from Google, and ask whoever answers your phone which questions come up every week. Those are the questions Ask Maps will be asked about you.
2. Put each answer where a machine can find it. Opening hours, holiday hours, parking, accessibility, payment methods and whether you do emergency or weekend work belong in your profile's own fields and attributes, not only in a paragraph of description. Each service belongs in the Services list with a short note of what's included. Anything longer, such as how your pricing works or what happens on a first visit, belongs on the matching service page of your website, written in plain sentences.
3. Answer the question on the page itself. "Call for prices" gives an AI nothing to quote. A typical price range with a note of what's included does. So does a sentence saying which postcodes you cover and how quickly you can usually get there. Avoid putting this in images or PDFs. For its AI features in Search, Google says no special schema markup is needed, and it hasn't said anything different for Maps. Normal LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data is still worth keeping accurate.
4. Get reviews that describe the job. "Great service" tells an AI very little. A review along the lines of "came out on a Sunday, replaced the lock on our back door and gave us the price before starting" answers three questions at once. You can ask customers to mention what you did for them. You can't tell them what to write, offer anything in return, or ask only the happy ones. Google's rules and UK law both cover this, and our guide to the UK fake review rules explains where the lines are.
5. Check what Google already holds about you. Find your own business in Google Maps and read it as a stranger would. Wrong hours, an old phone number or a category that's nearly right will produce confident, wrong AI answers. If you've moved, renamed or changed what you offer, fix the profile now, along with the main directories that copy it. This is the same clean-up we do as part of Google Business Profile optimisation.
How you'll know it has arrived
Open Google Maps on your phone, find your business, and look for an option to ask about the place. When it appears, ask it the five questions customers ask you most and read what it says. A wrong or missing answer points straight at the profile field or web page that needs fixing. Until then, everything above is the same work that helps you rank in the map pack today, so none of it is wasted if the UK launch takes longer than people expect.