Most small business owners treat their Google listing as a set and forget thing. Name, address, opening hours, photos of the van, done. Fair enough. But there is one part of the listing that behaves differently from everything else, and it tends to get noticed only when a stranger has already answered a customer incorrectly.
The questions and answers section.
We manage dozens of Google Business Profiles, mostly for trades and local services around Ascot, Bracknell and Camberley, and the Q&A is the bit we spend an uncomfortable amount of time cleaning up. Here is what makes it strange, and what you can actually do about it.
Anyone can answer
The obvious part first. On your listing, anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer it, not only the business owner. A customer can ask whether a cafe serves decaf, and some stranger in Slough who has never been there can reply. Google allows it because they assume the community will self correct. Sometimes it does.
The owner gets a small “You’re the owner” label next to their post, which sounds like an advantage until you notice how other users’ answers work. They can be upvoted. Your official reply, sitting at the bottom of the thread with two votes, can be buried under a confident wrong answer with fourteen. On the hairdresser profiles we look after, we have seen a stranger’s guess about parking quietly outrank the salon’s own instructions for months.
So the crown you are given for owning the business is decorative. What floats to the top is what looks most helpful to strangers.
You will probably see it late
Questions often appear publicly before the owner is notified at all. Google is supposed to email you when someone adds a question to your profile. For some businesses that works fine. For others, we have found month old questions sitting on a listing with no memory of an email, and the alert, when it arrived, had gone to a promotions tab nobody opens.
If you rely on the notification, you are relying on something you have already seen fail once. The only dependable method is a recurring look at the listing itself. Fifteen minutes on the first Monday of each month, calendar reminder, whole team if you have one. That is genuinely enough for most businesses.
Old questions resurface where you would not expect
This is the part that surprises people. A question from two or three years ago can surface in the knowledge panel when someone searches your business name on desktop. The live site might say you do bathrooms now, but a well placed old answer about “do you still do plumbing callouts?” keeps appearing beside your name, because Google treats that section as crowd-sourced facts about you.
You cannot control which old thread Google decides is still relevant. You can only make sure that, whatever resurfaces, the best answer on it is yours.
Declining is sometimes the right move
Here is where most advice gets it wrong, including some of what was written about this in 2021. You cannot fully delete questions from your own listing. You can decline a question, or remove individual answers, and that is your lot.
The instinct is to answer everything fast. Resist it, at least sometimes. A question that is vague, stale or mildly hostile can be declined, and declining takes it out of circulation in a way that answering never does. We would rather decline a question about a dispute with a customer from 2023 than answer it in public and feed the algorithm an engagement it did not need. Answering everything is not a badge of responsiveness here. It is a way of keeping dead threads alive.
For the questions that deserve a reply, reply properly. Short, plain, and in your own voice, because strangers will read it as the word of the business whether you meant it that way or not.
What the numbers will not tell you
You might be hoping to check how many people view your Q&A and prove the section matters. GBP insights no longer break question views out the way they once did, whatever the older articles say. Check what you can actually see in your own dashboard rather than trusting a blog post written when the feature was new. The honest position is that you mostly cannot measure it. You maintain it because leaving a space where strangers can answer for you is a bad trade, not because a chart tells you to.
If you want the wider picture on getting more from a Google listing, our guide to Google Business Profile optimisation for Berkshire businesses covers the parts everyone remembers to check. This article is about the one nobody does.
The five minute version: open Maps, search your own business name, scroll to the questions, and see who has answered for you lately. Then book the fifteen minutes. And if you would rather someone else kept an eye on it each month, that is a conversation worth having over our contact page.
