Google's AI Now Writes Your Business Q&A From Your Reviews — Here's Why That Changes Everything
What happened
Google has finished retiring the manual Q&A section on Google Business Profiles. The old "ask a question" feature — where customers posted a question and waited for the business owner to answer — has been replaced by an AI-generated system powered by Gemini, which automatically drafts answers from your business information, reviews, and website content.
The Q&A API was officially discontinued in November 2025, and the change has now rolled out to the vast majority of UK listings. Instead of a public Q&A thread, customers see AI-drafted answers alongside the "Ask Maps" search box that launched earlier in April.
Crucially, the source material for these AI-generated answers is your own review content. If a customer asks "do they do emergency callouts?" or "are they Gas Safe registered?", Google's AI stitches the answer together from what past customers have written about you — not from what you've written about yourself.
What this means for tradespeople
Your reviews are now doing two jobs at once.
The first is the obvious one — social proof that helps a homeowner pick you over the next guy. That hasn't changed. The second is new: your reviews are now the primary training data for the AI that answers customer questions about your business in the search results.
If your reviews mention "emergency callout at 11pm", "installed a new boiler in under a day", or "Gas Safe engineer, showed his card" — those specifics get absorbed and surfaced. If all your reviews just say "great service, thanks Dave", there's nothing for the AI to work with, and you miss out on every AI-generated answer that could have sent a customer your way.
For plumbers, electricians, heating engineers, and anyone who handles emergencies, this is a quiet but significant shift. The specifics in your reviews now determine what Google tells potential customers about you before they even click through.
What to do about it
- Review your last ten Google reviews. Count how many mention a specific service (boiler install, rewire, emergency callout, fence replacement) versus generic praise.
- When you ask for reviews, nudge customers toward specifics. "If you have a minute, a line about what we did would mean a lot" is enough.
- If you only have a handful of reviews, get more — AI needs content to pull from. TapReview is a £9/month tool that sends automated review requests via WhatsApp and SMS after every job, so specifics get captured while the work is fresh.
Source: IMEG Online — Google Business Profile Q&A Feature Going Away