Strangers answered questions about your funeral home on Google. Now Gemini does.

On December 3, 2025, Google quietly announced that the public Q&A box on Business Profiles is going away. In its place, an AI-powered “Ask” experience: customers “ask their question directly in Google Maps and get an updated, instant answer based on your answers and relevant reviews.” Most funeral home owners never knew the old Q&A box existed. That was exactly the problem, and the reason its replacement deserves twenty minutes of your attention: the strangers are gone, and the thing answering for your funeral home now is a language model.

The box strangers filled

Google’s Q&A section let anyone ask a public question on a business’s profile — and let anyone answer it. BrightLocal’s guide to the feature named the flaw plainly: anyone could reply, which “led to many inappropriate or inaccurate answers.” The scale of the neglect was measured back in 2019, across more than 43,000 business profiles: 91% of questions were never answered by the business owner, and 82.6% of the questions that did get answers got one from a Local Guide — a stranger, earning three points toward a Google rewards level whether the answer was right or wrong. The neglect was structural, not lazy: as local-search expert Joy Hawkins documented, the business dashboard had nowhere that notified an owner a new question existed.

Made concrete — and this example is ours, a composite, though every mechanic in it is documented above: someone asks whether Hillcrest Funeral Home offers cremation. A well-meaning passerby answers “no, burials only.” It’s wrong. It collects a few upvotes, and the most upvoted content displayed right on the profile — on the one page a searching family was certain to see, for as long as nobody noticed.

What Google changed, with dates

The removal is the third act of a pattern. Google retired Business Profile chat in July 2024 — the interaction surfaces keep disappearing. Then the Q&A machinery: the Q&A API was discontinued on November 3, 2025 — Google’s developer changelog says plainly that “you will no longer be able to read or post questions and answers using the API” — and the December 3 announcement began phasing out the public section itself, with Google’s rationale that customers found it hard to “wade through all the questions and find timely answers.” The rollout is staggered profile by profile, so by the time you read this your funeral home’s listing may show the new “Ask” experience, the old threads, or an in-between state. In March 2026 Google went further and launched Ask Maps, a Gemini-powered conversational search across more than 300 million places and the reviews of 500 million contributors — a related surface, though Google hasn’t said the two are the same feature.

Two details in the fine print matter more than the headline. First, the old content doesn’t vanish: Google says published Q&A “will continue to power Google’s understanding of the real world and may be shown in Maps”. That stranger’s wrong cremation answer now sits in the pile the AI reads, while the tools for correcting it are retired. Second, the only owner-facing input Google has named is answering “aggregated questions” — common questions bundled up, whose answers then power responses to similar inquiries. Some vendors describe an approval queue where the AI drafts answers for the owner to review. Google has confirmed no such thing. Don’t build your plan on a safety net nobody has shown you.

Who answers for your funeral home now?

Gemini does — composing from your profile fields, your reviews, and your website, per Google’s own description and the January 2026 reporting on the change. The shorthand circulating in local-SEO circles is that your website is now your Q&A section. That’s directionally right, and it’s why this change lands harder on funeral homes than on plumbers: the questions families ask are time-sensitive and heavy — do they handle cremation, what does direct burial cost, can they do a Catholic vigil — and a confident wrong answer now arrives in Google’s voice, on Google’s surface, with no visible author to argue with. A stranger’s bad answer could at least be flagged. The AI’s answer can only be fed better sources.

Feed the sources

Ask your own profile the arrangement-room questions. Open Google Maps, find your funeral home, and put your five most-asked questions to it — cremation, price range, religious services, pre-planning, receptions. Note what comes back and where it’s wrong. This is the narrow audit; what your name returns across search generally is the wider one. If your profile still shows old Q&A threads during the transition, read them — you may be seeing years of unwatched answers for the first time.

Fix the inputs the answer is built from. The profile itself does the heaviest lifting — services listed, attributes set, hours and phone current — the same completeness that already decides how AI describes you. Reviews are the second input Google names: a review that says “they handled my father’s cremation with such care” is now evidence the AI cites when someone asks whether you do cremation at all.

Put the answers on your website, in crawlable text. The questions that used to live in Google’s box need a home you own, and an FAQ page written so machines can quote it is that home — same questions, second venue, and the second venue is now the one that feeds the answer. Google has published no weighting of website versus profile versus reviews, so treat this as covering the sources, not gaming a formula.

The mistakes that waste the effort

Following a stale playbook. Guides still circulating tell owners to “seed” their own Q&A — post five to eight questions and answer them yourself. That tactic is dead; the API that allowed it was retired in November 2025, and the box it fed is being removed. A guide that recommends seeding was written before the change.

Stuffing keywords where a ranking lever never was. Q&A never appeared as a named factor in local-ranking research — Whitespark’s 2026 survey weights profile signals around 32%, reviews around 20%, and website around 19%, with Q&A nowhere in the list. Its stakes were always reputational: what a family reads, not where you rank. That’s still the stake now.

Waiting for the dust to settle. The transition is exactly when old wrong answers linger, new AI answers begin, and almost no owner is looking. The funeral home that audits in August is correcting sources months before its competitors notice the box is gone.

The mic changed hands

This is the cleanest dated example yet of the pattern this whole series tracks: the AI answer layer is eating the human-curated layer, and Google just did it to its own product. The question box you could have seeded is closed. What remains is what the machine reads — your profile, your reviews, your website — which happens to be the same set of sources every other AI assistant reads too. Feed them well and you’ve answered the next family’s question everywhere at once. Leave them thin, and Gemini will answer anyway — it just won’t be you talking.