Google retired Business Profile Q&A: what to do now

Google publishes a Learning Center that describes itself as everything you need to get started with your Business Profile. Read on 26 July 2026, its index covers setup and verification, editing your information, photos and videos, reviews, posts, social links and contact details.

There is no questions and answers section in it. Not a reduced one, not a deprecated one: the merchant-facing index of what you can manage does not mention the field at all. A search of the same help centre for questions and answers returns a single article about place information drawn from answers, and nothing describing a public thread a business seeds. Meanwhile the Maps content policy still documents how to report an inappropriate question or answer, so something is evidently still there for users. What follows is what can be verified, and then what to do with the answers, which is the part that actually matters. Related pieces sit on the getting-booked hub.

What does the official index actually list?

Six areas, and it is worth reading as a list of what survives.

Getting started covers setting up a profile, adding or claiming a business, verifying it and checking verification status.

Editing covers finding your profile, editing your business information and checking the status of an edit.

Photos and videos covers adding them, adding a logo and cover photo, and deleting them.

Reviews covers reading and replying, editing or deleting your reply, and sharing a link or a QR code to request reviews.

Keeping customers informed covers creating posts to share updates, offers or events, and adding social media links.

Contact information covers adding a phone number, adding text and messaging options, and adding a website.

The index is published as the Google Business Profile Learning Center.

Fishing Guide Tampa Bay, FL

What is missing, and what does that mean?

The Q and A field, and it means stop planning around it.

Nothing in that index describes seeding a question, answering one, or managing a thread of them.

A search of the same help centre for questions and answers returned exactly one article, headed answer questions, describing place information from answers appearing on the business's main page, its About tab and in search results.

That is a narrower function than the public thread a great deal of marketing advice still tells guides to prime with their own questions.

No retirement date is asserted here, because none was located, and inventing one would be worse than the gap.

What can be said is what was verified on the day: the field is absent from Google's own account of what a business can manage.

Which is enough to stop building a plan on it and to move the answers somewhere you control.

The rest of the profile, the parts that are documented, is set up in the profile setup piece.

Is anything still there for users?

Yes, and the evidence is in the content policy rather than the merchant help.

The Maps user generated content policy still carries full instructions for reporting an inappropriate question or answer, on a computer and in the application.

The desktop route runs through the questions and answers section of the business panel and a more questions link; the mobile route through a see all questions option.

So the surface exists somewhere for somebody, and content posted there is governed by the same prohibited and restricted content rules as everything else on Maps.

What has gone, on the evidence available today, is the merchant-side management story.

The practical consequence for a guide is that you may still find yourself needing to report something there while having no documented way to seed it.

Which is an argument for owning the answers rather than renting the surface.

How to handle anything that does appear is covered in the piece on negative reviews.

So where do the answers belong?

On pages you own, and the platform has been telling you so.

The documented profile fields all point outward: the website field, the posts field, the services list, the description.

Every one of those is a pointer to something you control, and none of them is a place to hold a body of answers.

Which resolves the question rather than complicating it. The answers go on your own site, and the profile links to them.

That has the further advantage of surviving whatever the platform does next, which on the evidence of this field is not predictable.

It also means the answers can be as long, as sourced and as specific as the question deserves.

Almost none of the questions clients ask have short answers, which is the next problem.

The page those answers should live on is described in the client FAQ template piece.

What do clients actually ask?

Four questions, and three have published federal answers.

Can we keep what we catch. How big does it have to be. Can you keep some too. And what happens on a longer trip.

Those are not vague preferences. For a Gulf reef fish operation each has a specific answer sitting in the Code of Federal Regulations, updated by rulemaking and citable.

Which makes them the ideal content for a page you own, because an answer with a citation behind it does something no reassurance can.

It also protects you, since the client who read the limit before the trip is not the client arguing about it on the deck.

What follows are those answers as the regulation states them, with the caveat that these provisions are amended, differ by fishery and region, and interact with state rules including permit requirements. Verify the current text and what applies to your own water before publishing any of it.

The pages that carry the place-specific version of all this belong to the water and city pages piece.

Can we keep what we catch?

Some of it, and the numbers are specific.

For Gulf reef fish the recreational bag limits are set out per person per day: one greater amberjack, two red snapper, and four groupers combined excluding goliath grouper.

Within that grouper limit no more than one speckled hind or one warsaw grouper may be taken per vessel per day, and no more than two gag or two red grouper per person per day.

Snappers other than red, lane and vermilion are limited to ten combined, of which no more than five may be mutton snapper.

Gulf reef fish not otherwise specified are limited to twenty combined, within which no more than one may be gray triggerfish and no more than ten may be vermilion snapper.

Banded rudderfish and lesser amberjack are limited to five combined, and hogfish in the Gulf zone outside the area south of 25 degrees 9 minutes north off western Florida is limited to five.

The regulation also notes that Nassau grouper in the Gulf zone may not be harvested or possessed at all.

The limits are published on eCFR at 50 CFR 622.38.

Can the captain keep some too?

No, and the regulation says it three times.

For greater amberjack the regulation states that no fish may be retained by the captain or crew of a vessel operating as a charter vessel or headboat, and that the bag limit for such captain and crew is zero.

It repeats the same sentence for groupers, and again for red snapper.

That is a flat answer to a question clients ask on almost every trip, usually kindly, usually assuming the answer is yes.

Publishing it in advance does two useful things: it removes an awkward conversation, and it quietly demonstrates that you know the rules governing your own fishery.

A client who reads that before booking has learned something about the operation that no amount of marketing copy conveys.

It also forecloses the version where somebody assumes a fish went into your cooler.

What the profile can legitimately say about the trip itself is set out in the services piece.

How big does it have to be?

It varies by species, and the responsibility is yours.

The size limits section opens by stating that all limits in it are minimum size limits unless specified otherwise, and that a fish not in compliance may not be possessed, sold or purchased.

It requires such a fish to be released immediately with a minimum of harm.

Then it states the part worth putting on your own page in bold: the operator of a vessel that fishes in the zone is responsible for ensuring that fish on board comply with the size limits.

Not the angler who caught it. The operator.

The published minimums include lane snapper at eight inches total length, vermilion at ten, cubera, gray and yellowtail at twelve, mutton at eighteen and gag at twenty-four.

Red snapper is more involved, at sixteen inches for a person subject to the bag limit and thirteen for a person who is not, with a separate floor of fourteen inches applying under an active state-management delegation for the private angling component.

The section is on eCFR at 50 CFR 622.37, and the authority behind the part is published at govinfo.

Gon Get'Em, TX

What about a longer trip?

A specific rule kicks in past thirty hours.

The possession limits provision for vessels holding a valid federal charter vessel or headboat permit for reef fish addresses trips that run long.

It provides that on a trip spanning more than thirty hours, a person, or a vessel in the case of speckled hind or warsaw grouper, may possess at any time during the trip no more than two daily bag limits.

That is the answer to a question overnight operations get constantly and usually answer from memory.

It also has a booking consequence, because it caps what a two-day trip can produce regardless of how the fishing goes.

Saying so before somebody books removes a specific disappointment that no amount of good guiding can prevent.

The same section carries further conditions on those possession limits, so read it rather than relying on this summary.

The category the profile uses to reach these clients at all is chosen in the categories piece.

How should an answer be written?

Number first, citation second, plain sentence third.

Lead with the figure, because somebody scanning for a number stops when they find one and leaves when they do not.

Follow it with where the figure comes from, named specifically enough that a sceptical reader could check it.

Then one sentence of what it means for their day, which is the part that turns a regulation into an answer.

Add the date you last checked it, because a page of limits with no date on it is a page nobody can trust in a year.

And say plainly that rules change and that the current text governs, which is honest and takes one line.

Anything longer than that per question and the page stops being read.

The same discipline applied to profile updates is described in the Google posts piece.

What must an answer never do?

Five things, and the first two are tempting.

Promise a number of fish, since a bag limit is a ceiling and never a forecast.

Present a state rule as a federal one, or the reverse, when the two frequently differ on the same water.

Carry a figure with no date and no source, which is how a page becomes wrong without anybody noticing.

Interpret a regulation for somebody's specific situation, which is advice rather than information.

And skip the awkward answers, because the awkward ones are precisely why the page earns trust.

A page that answers only the flattering questions is a brochure, and readers can tell within two entries.

What the wider search work around it looks like is set out in the local search piece.

Where does this go wrong?

Six ways, and the first is still the commonest.

Building the plan around a profile field that Google's own index no longer describes.

Seeding questions you wrote yourself in a public space, which reads as artificial wherever it is done.

Copying limits from another operation's page rather than from the regulation.

Publishing a table of numbers and never revisiting it, so it silently goes stale after the next rulemaking.

Answering only the easy questions and leaving the keep-and-size ones to the dock.

And writing three hundred words where a number and a sentence would do.

The map-side consequences of getting the surrounding profile right are examined in the map pack piece.

What do operators not expect?

That the regulation is better copy than anything they would write.

A sentence saying the bag limit for the captain and crew is zero does more for trust than a paragraph about integrity.

The second surprise is that the operator, not the angler, carries the size-limit responsibility, which most clients assume runs the other way.

The third is how quickly a field disappears from a platform's documentation, and how much advice keeps recommending it afterwards.

The fourth is that the questions worth answering are the same eight every season, so the work is finite and done once.

And the fifth is that a page of dated, sourced answers reads as expertise in a way no amount of adjectives manage.

None of which requires a platform's permission, which is the point of putting it on your own site.

The photographs that sit alongside on the profile are covered in the profile photos piece.

How would you build the list?

From your sent messages, in one sitting.

Open the last two months of replies to enquiries and write down every question you answered more than once.

Sort them into the ones with a published answer and the ones only you can answer.

Pull the published ones from the regulation itself rather than from a summary, and note the section number and the date you read it.

Write the rest in your own words, at a hundred and fifty words each, and stop.

Put the page on your own site, link it from the profile's website field, and send it in reply to the next enquiry.

Then diary a check for the same week next year, when the rulemaking cycle has had time to move things.

The review side of the same profile is handled in the reviews strategy piece.

The answers, in order

Own the page, lead with numbers, date everything, check yearly.

Stop planning around a profile field that the platform's own index of manageable features does not contain.

Build the answer page on your own site, where nothing can retire it.

Take the four questions with published answers straight from the regulation, with section numbers.

Say plainly that the captain and crew keep nothing, because that answer buys more trust than any claim you could make.

Say plainly that the operator carries the size-limit responsibility, because clients assume otherwise.

Date every figure, state that rules change, and never present a state rule as a federal one.

Link the page from the profile's website field, send it with every enquiry reply, and check it once a year.