Google Quietly Killed the Q&A Tab on Business Profiles. Its AI Replacement Won't Always Get Your Answers Right.

For years, the Q&A tab on a Google Business Profile was where customers asked the odd, specific question a menu or a photo gallery couldn't answer — “do you deliver on Fridays?”, “is there parking?”, “can I bring my own tools for the fitting?” — and, ideally, the owner or a past customer answered it directly. That tab is gone. Google confirmed it is retiring Q&A from Business Profiles and Maps, following a September 2025 announcement that the underlying My Business Q&A API would be shut down (it was officially retired on November 3, 2025), and replacing it with an AI-powered “Ask” feature — often referred to as Ask Maps — that generates answers in real time instead of surfacing old, crowdsourced ones, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable.

Google's stated reasoning, per that reporting: as Q&A grew over the years it became harder for customers to wade through long threads of questions to find a timely, relevant answer, and the feature had become a magnet for spam and stale responses. The fix Google chose is to let an AI model answer the question itself, pulling from “publicly available information” about the business — website copy, listings, reviews, whatever it can find — rather than routing the question to the owner first.

The part that should worry small business owners

The old Q&A system had one real virtue: an owner could type the correct answer themselves. It was slow and often ignored, but it was editable, attributable, and accurate when someone bothered to use it. Ask Maps removes that step entirely. The AI is now guessing on your behalf, in your business's name, in front of a customer who is one tap away from walking in — and it's guessing from whatever scraps of public information happen to be indexed, which for a lot of small UAE businesses means an outdated website, a two-year-old review, or nothing at all.

If your working hours changed for Ramadan, if you stopped doing a service, if your new location doesn't have the parking your old one did — none of that gets corrected by asking Google nicely. There is no edit button on an AI-generated answer the way there was on a Q&A thread.

The fix isn't fighting Google's AI — it's giving customers a faster, correct alternative

You can't turn Ask Maps off, and you shouldn't spend energy trying to out-SEO an AI summary. What you can control is how fast a customer reaches you, directly, instead of settling for whatever Google's model inferred. That's a physical-presence problem as much as a digital one: the moment a customer is standing at your counter, your car, your clinic desk, or your stand at a market, give them a one-tap route to a channel you actually update yourself.

• A WhatsApp NFC Chat Card with QR puts a real-time chat with an actual person one tap or scan away — no AI guesswork about your delivery days, no waiting for Google's index to catch up on a hours change.
• A MyInfo.ae Digital Business Card with QR gives you a profile page you control completely and can edit the moment anything changes — hours, services, policies, location — so the “source of truth” a curious customer lands on is one you wrote, not one an AI stitched together.

Neither of these replaces having a clean, accurate Google Business Profile — that still matters, and it's still worth keeping current so Ask Maps has better raw material to work from. But relying on Google's AI to represent your business correctly, with no way to correct it question-by-question anymore, is a bet most small operators shouldn't take without a backup.

What to actually do about it

• Check what Ask Maps is currently telling people about your business — search your own business name and tap “Ask about this place” to see what it says.
• Make sure your website and Business Profile have the specific details customers actually ask about (parking, delivery days, walk-ins, payment methods) written in plain text, since that's the raw material the AI pulls from.
• Put a direct, always-current contact channel in physical reach of customers — on the counter, the door, the invoice — so the AI's guess is never the only answer available.

Google removed a small, editable feature and replaced it with a much bigger, much less editable one. The businesses least affected by that trade will be the ones that already made it easy to reach a real, accurate answer without going through Google at all.

Photo by Ali Mkumbwa on Unsplash