Google quietly retired the Q&A feature on Business Profiles on November 3, 2025. The Q&A API went dark the same day. In its place, Google rolled out Ask Maps, a Gemini-powered conversational layer that answers customer questions about your business automatically. Ask Maps does not wait for the owner to reply. It reads your profile, your website, and your reviews, then writes a confident answer in real time. The customer never sees a question pending owner response again.
For local operators, this is a hard pivot. The old playbook of seeding your own Q&A on a profile to capture long-tail keywords is over. The new lever is your structured data. If you want to control what Google says about your business, you control the source it reads. That source is your website, with FAQPage and LocalBusiness schema doing the heavy lifting.
Q&A Is Dead. Ask Maps Took Its Place
The shift started March 12, 2026, when Google announced the biggest update to Maps in over a decade. Ask Maps lets a customer type a real-world question, like “where can you charge a phone without buying a coffee,” and get a conversational answer pulled from local business data. The feature runs on Gemini. It draws from three sources in priority order: your verified Google Business Profile fields, your website (with schema), and your reviews on Google.
The retirement of manual Q&A is the operator-facing consequence. Through 2024 and 2025, agencies sold “Q&A seeding” as a local SEO tactic. You would post your own FAQ on your profile, upvote your own answer, and the questions ranked for long-tail searches. That tactic is gone. The questions panel still appears on some profiles during the rollout, but Google has confirmed it is sunsetting. Anything you seeded there is no longer load-bearing.
Where Ask Maps Actually Gets Its Answer
Gemini does not invent answers from nothing. It reads sources, then writes. For your business, the priority stack is straightforward. First, it pulls structured fields from your Business Profile: hours, services, attributes, address, phone. Second, it scans your website for matching content, with structured data weighted heavier than prose. Third, it sweeps your reviews for sentiment and recurring topics.
This stack is why your FAQ page now matters more than your Q&A tab ever did. A review that says “the wait was 45 minutes” becomes signal. A page on your site marked up with FAQPage schema that says “average wait time is 20 minutes on weekdays, 45 on Saturdays” becomes the answer. Without structured data, Gemini still answers. It just draws from prose, reviews, and whatever third-party listings rank in your area. You lose the script.
The May 2026 core update, which Google launched on May 21 and will finish around June 4, reinforces this stack. Local-pack volatility is concentrated in verticals where AI Overviews already sit between the user and the local results: medical, legal, home services, and financial. In those verticals, Google’s AI layer is the front door now. The business with the cleanest source data wins the citation.
The FAQ Schema That Controls Your Answer
Here is the minimum viable setup. Build an FAQ page on your website. Add 10 to 20 questions that real customers ask you on the phone. Mark it up with JSON-LD using FAQPage schema. Pair it with LocalBusiness schema on your homepage so Gemini links the two. Drop both into the head of the relevant pages.
A working FAQPage snippet looks like this:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Do you take walk-ins on Saturdays?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Yes. Walk-in slots open at 9am Saturdays. Wait time runs 30 to 60 minutes."
}
},
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "How much is a basic tune-up?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Basic tune-ups start at $89. We quote any extra work before we start it."
}
}
]
}
</script>Write the questions the way a customer would type them, not the way an SEO would write a headline. “How much is a basic tune-up” beats “Tune-up pricing.” Then write the answer the way you would say it on the phone. Short. Specific. With a number. Gemini paraphrases the wording, but it holds onto the numbers and the specifics. Your prices, your hours, your wait times, your service-area zip codes all stay intact.
Pair the FAQPage with LocalBusiness markup that names your business, address, phone, and openingHoursSpecification. If you serve a delivery radius, add areaServed. If you have amenities (free wifi, ADA access, kids welcome), use the amenityFeature property. These hooks are what Gemini cross-references when a customer asks something like “is there a quiet coffee shop nearby with wifi and seating.”
The Tradeoff Most Operators Get Wrong
Schema is not a magic ranking lever. It is a citation lever. Adding FAQPage markup will not move you up the local pack on its own. What it does is decide what gets quoted when the AI answers a customer instead of showing the pack at all. That distinction matters. In high-AI-Overview verticals, roughly 68 percent of local queries now show an AI layer above the pack, according to Whitespark data this month. Citation share inside that layer is the new ranking.
The cost is also real. Building an FAQ page that Gemini trusts is not a one-hour task. Plan three to five hours of work the first week. List the 20 questions you actually answer on the phone. Write the answers in your own voice. Get the JSON-LD generated (most CMS plugins do this, but Yoast Local SEO, Rank Math FAQ schema, and Schema App are the cleanest options). Validate the result in Google’s Rich Results Test. Then revisit it quarterly when prices or hours change.
Skip the temptation to over-engineer. Twelve good questions beat forty padded ones. Gemini weighs answers it can verify against your profile and your reviews. If a review says you charge $99 and your FAQ says $79, the AI hedges, or it picks the source with the most signals. Keep the source of truth aligned across your profile, your website, and the reality customers describe in reviews.
What to Ship This Week
Three actions, in order. First, audit your existing GBP Q&A tab. Export the questions and any answers you posted. Move the highest-traffic ones onto your website’s FAQ page so the content survives the sunset. Second, add FAQPage and LocalBusiness JSON-LD to that page and to your homepage. Use Google’s Rich Results Test to confirm the markup parses cleanly. Third, text three recent customers and ask what they wanted to know before booking. Those are the questions your future customers are typing into Ask Maps. Build the FAQ around them.
One signal to watch in the next 30 days: the AI-generated answer that appears under your business name in Maps. Google has started rolling out the “suggested answer” view in select regions. Search your own business by name on mobile, scroll to the questions section, and read what Gemini wrote. If the answer is wrong, the fix is upstream. You change the source on your website, you change the script in Maps. That is the whole game now.
