Ask Maps

For businesses with a local focus, this is a new surface for visibility, and one over which they have far less direct control than over their entry in the local pack.

What Ask Maps is

Google presented Ask Maps on 12 March 2026 and described it in the official blog post as a conversational experience that answers complex real-world questions. It launched in the USA and India on Android and iOS; a desktop version had been announced at that point.

The example questions from Google's announcement show what it is about: "My phone is about to die. Where can I charge it without queuing for ages for a coffee?" or "Is there a public tennis court with floodlights where I can play tonight?" Such queries contain several conditions at the same time. A classic list of results cannot answer them because it would have to check category, facilities, opening hours and distance in parallel.

As its data basis, Google cites more than 300 million places and reviews from more than 500 million contributors. The answers are also personalised, among other things on the basis of places you have searched for or saved in Maps.

Why Ask Maps exists: the end of the public GBP Q&A

Until 2025, every Google Business Profile had a public questions and answers section. Users could ask questions, and owners and other users could answer. This feature has been discontinued.

Google documents the formal cut in the change log of the Q&A API: on 15 September 2025 Google announced the shutdown, and on 3 November 2025 the My Business Q&A API was discontinued. Since then, questions and answers can no longer be read or published programmatically. The associated notification types were also deprecated.

On the interface, the public Q&A section subsequently disappeared from profiles. In its place, an AI-supported question feature appeared in the Maps app, the forerunner and today's neighbour of what Google markets as Ask Maps. The difference is bigger than it sounds: previously a person from your business answered; today a language model formulates the answer from data it gathers.

Where Ask Maps gets its answers from

Google has never disclosed the weighting. From observation in the industry, however, a reliable order has emerged, which Greg Sterling (Near Media) described as follows for the conversational feature in the profile: Google Business Profile, user reviews, the company website, third-party sources.

This explains why Ask Maps cannot be served with a single measure. The answer arises from the sum of your data trails. A well-maintained profile without substance on the website is just as insufficient as a perfect website without attributes in the profile.

A documented example

In January 2026, Miriam Ellis of Whitespark traced the mechanism with a simple case: she asked about a doughnut shop whether it sold a particular kind of doughnut and received an AI-generated answer that was recognisably based on reviews and the uploaded menu. The cross-check confirmed it: the item really was on the menu stored in the Google Business Profile.

The lesson is unspectacular, and that is exactly why it matters: Ask Maps does not invent competences. It only answers what is in your data. If the information is missing, the answer is essentially "I have no information on that", and the user switches to the next provider whose profile is more informative.

You cannot report a wrong answer

This is the most unpleasant part. Google does not document any way of complaining about, correcting or removing an individual Ask Maps answer. You can report a review. You can report an incorrect entry. A generated answer that a model formulates afresh at the moment of the query does not exist as an object for long enough to be reported.

What Google does document is a reporting route for business summaries on Google Maps, i.e. editorial summaries and review snippets. And even there Google only intervenes in two narrowly defined cases: when keywords or snippets have been assigned to the wrong place, or when an editorial summary describes services that the business does not offer. Unclear or negative summaries are explicitly not removed.

The only reliable lever is therefore the source. If Ask Maps says something wrong about you, you have to find out which data source the false statement comes from and correct that source. If an outdated price is in a business directory, you correct the directory. If reviews describe a service that you have discontinued, you correct this for new reviews and on your website. That takes time and is never completely controllable.

Rollout: where Ask Maps is available, and where it is not

After the launch in the USA and India in March 2026, the international expansion followed on 6 August 2026. For this, Google explicitly names English as the language and six named markets: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan and Mexico, together with "more than 150 countries and territories".

Nothing has thus been confirmed for the German-speaking region. Google has named neither a German-language version nor a launch in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Anyone listing Ask Maps as an active channel in a German marketing report today is working with an assumption, not with an established fact. Preparing is still worthwhile, since it consists of measures that already work in the German market today anyway.

Categories in which Ask Maps is not shown

Availability observably depends on the profile's primary category. Mike Blumenthal investigated this for the forerunner feature; Whitespark confirmed the finding in a follow-up check in January 2026. According to this, the following were excluded:

• most medical categories, including therapists and addiction treatment centres, though not dentists
• notoriously spam-prone categories such as locksmiths, removal companies and garage door installation and repair
• legally regulated categories such as cannabis outlets

The pattern behind this is plausible: Google holds back generative answers where incorrect information causes harm or where fraud patterns are widespread. If you work in one of these categories, the classic local pack will remain your channel for the foreseeable future, and the choice of category remains a deliberate decision with consequences.

What Ask Maps can additionally do since August 2026

With the international expansion, Google has extended the feature considerably. Three points in particular are relevant for businesses:

• Personal Intelligence. Ask Maps can access Gmail and include flights and reservations in its suggestions. The feature has to be activated manually; Google Calendar and other apps had been announced.
• Memory and real-time public transport. Earlier conversations can be continued, and Ask Maps draws on real-time data on buses, trains, underground trains and ferries, including delays.
• Agentic actions. Ask Maps can order food for collection (at launch via Square and Toast, with Uber Eats announced), compare and book hotels and find local events. These features initially launched in the USA.

The agentic part is the most interesting strategically. As soon as an assistant not only recommends but fills the basket, the connection of your systems decides whether you can be booked at all. Anyone who offers neither online reservations nor an ordering back end drops out of the process before the user has been able to decide.

What you should do in practice

The measures overlap strongly with solid local SEO. That is the good news: you do not have to build anything new, just make what exists more complete.

• Check and refine the primary category. It controls both relevance and the availability of the feature.
• Fill in services and attributes. Every field Google offers is potential answer material: parking, accessibility, payment methods, appointments by arrangement.
• Maintain opening hours, including public holidays. Time-critical queries are the most common use case of all.
• Encourage reviews with concrete language. Ask specifically for feedback on individual services. "Very satisfied" is worthless to a language model; "connected our SAP interface in three weeks" is answer material.
• Keep photos up to date. Inside, outside, team, machines, vehicles: images carry metadata and context.
• Expand the FAQs on your website. The questions that used to be in the GBP Q&A now belong visibly on your site, written out and answered individually.
• Mark up location data in a structured way. With structured data of the type LocalBusiness, you make address, opening hours and services unambiguously machine-readable.
• Clean up third-party sources. Outdated information in business directories is the most common cause of incorrect AI answers about a business.

How Ask Maps relates to the local pack, AI Overviews and AI Mode

Ask Maps is one of several surfaces that access the same pool of place data, not an isolated product. The local pack shows three entries by relevance, distance and prominence. AI Overviews and Google AI Mode formulate answers in search and also draw on business profiles and reviews. Ask Maps does the same within Google Maps, with a stronger local focus and now with the ability to act.

For planning this means: these are not four optimisation projects. It is one. The data quality of your business profile, the substance of your website and the language of your reviews decide at the same time on map position, AI mentions and bookability. What changes is measurability: a mention in a generated answer leaves no clean entry in your analytics.

In brief

Ask Maps is Google's Gemini assistant in Google Maps, available in the USA and India since 12 March 2026 and, since 6 August 2026, in English in six further named markets as well as more than 150 countries and territories. It replaces the public Q&A feature of the Google Business Profile, which was shut down on 3 November 2025, draws its answers from profile, reviews, website and third-party sources and offers no documented way of having a wrong answer corrected. In medical, spam-prone and regulated categories, the feature is not shown. Nothing has been confirmed for Germany so far, and preparing for it consists of work that already pays off here today anyway.