Somewhere on your Google Business Profile there used to be a small section where customers asked things like "do you take walk-ins?" and "is there parking out back?" If you were on top of it, you answered those questions yourself, in your own words, and they sat there working for you every day.
That section is gone. What replaced it went live in Canada on 6 August 2026, which means this is not a change to get ahead of. It is already how your customers are being answered.
What changed, and when
Two dates matter.
Google shut off the My Business Q&A programming interface on 3 November 2025, after announcing it that September (sourced from Google's own developer changelog). That is what stopped review and reputation tools from reading or posting questions. The public section followed, replaced by an artificial intelligence answer layer rather than a list of community questions.
Ask Maps, Google's conversational answer feature, launched in March 2026 and rolled out to Canada on 6 August 2026, alongside Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan and Mexico (sourced from Google).
So the sequence is finished. There is no longer a public place on your profile where you write an answer and a customer reads it as you wrote it. Google assembles the answer instead.
What Ask Maps is actually working from
Google describes Ask Maps as combining "Gemini model capabilities together with the world's freshest map" (sourced from Google). On the underlying data, Google has said that Maps "analyzes information from over 300 million places, including reviews from our community of more than 500 million contributors" (sourced from Google).
Read that plainly. The answer a customer now gets about your business is assembled from your business information and your reviews. If both are thin, the answer will be thin, and unlike the old Q&A section you will never see it happen. Nobody sends you a copy of what Google said about you.
This sits inside a bigger pattern. Between January and April 2026, roughly 68 percent of Google searches in the United States ended without a click through to any website (sourced from SparkToro's analysis, reported by Search Engine Land). That is a US figure and Canadian behaviour will not match it exactly, but the direction is not in dispute. The answer increasingly happens before anyone reaches your website. Your job is to make sure the material it is built from is yours.
The five places your answers go now
These five are not simply where to put information. They are the inputs.
Your business description. The broad answers belong here: what you do, who you serve, what makes you different. Write it for a person, not for a keyword.
Your services and products list. Most owners fill this in once and never return. If a customer used to ask "do you do X?", then X should be a named service with its own description.
Your attributes. Accessibility, payment methods, amenities, appointment requirements. These are checkboxes, they take ten minutes, and they answer a surprising share of what people used to type into Q&A.
Your review replies. When a review mentions something factual, answer it properly in the reply. Those replies are public, they are indexed, and they are read by the next customer.
A real FAQ page on your own website. This is the durable one, and it is the only one on this list that no platform can retire.
The part most people have not noticed: customers can now edit your profile by talking
This is new in the August 2026 release which is why I have given it its own section.
Google has added what it calls conversational contributions. Customers can "suggest edits conversationally, right from Ask Maps", and can share what Google calls an insider tip. Google's own example is someone saying "more parking is available behind the building", which "Ask Maps will surface this helpful information to others in the community" (sourced from Google). People can also upload a photo of your storefront to update your hours.
Most of that is genuinely useful, and most contributors mean well. But it changes something for you. Information about your business can now be added by people who do not work for you, through a conversation you never see. A tip that was true last year, or true of the shop next door, can end up attached to you.
There is no dramatic fix for this. There is a boring one, which is to look at your profile on a schedule rather than assuming it still says what you left it saying. Once a month is enough.
How to recover the answers you already wrote
First, log into your Business Profile and look. Depending on your account and region, some historical questions and answers may still be visible in the dashboard. If they are, copy them into a document today, before that changes too.
If they are already gone, do not try to reconstruct them from memory. There is a better method and it costs nothing. Ask whoever answers your phone to write down every question a customer asks, for two weeks. You will end up with a more accurate and more current list than the one you lost, because it reflects what people are asking now rather than what they asked in 2023.
Why the website version is the one that lasts
Every platform feature is a rented storefront. It is fine to trade there, and you should, but keeping the only copy of your inventory in a rented space is how you end up here, rewriting work you already did.
An FAQ page on your own site is indexable, quotable, linkable, and still yours after the next feature change. It also does the thing Google explicitly asks for, which is to make your information complete. Google's own local ranking guidance puts it simply: "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results" (sourced from Google).
If your profile has gaps beyond the missing answers, start with the Google Business Profile checklist and work through it properly before adding anything new. And if you are not sure whether any of this is currently costing you customers, the five signs your business is invisible on Google is the faster diagnostic.
The question to answer this week
Here is the uncomfortable version. Google is answering questions about your business today, in Canada, whether or not you have given it anything good to work with. The only variable you control is the quality of the material it is drawing on.
So: if a customer asked you the same thing five times last month, where is that answer written down right now? If the honest answer is "in a Google feature that no longer exists", then you already know what this week's job is.