Google Business Profile Questions and Answers Are Public Property

A Malton joiner rang us in June because his Google listing said he did not fit kitchens. He fits kitchens. He has fitted them for nineteen years.

Nobody at Google wrote that. Somebody had typed the question into the Q&A box on his profile, and a stranger with a Local Guide badge had answered it wrongly. It had been sitting there for eight months.

That is the argument in one go. Google Business Profile questions and answers is the only part of your listing other people can fill in for you, and if you leave it empty, eventually somebody will.

Anyone can answer, and the wrong answer sticks

The Q&A box sits under your photos on mobile, right where a customer is deciding whether to tap call. Anyone with a Google account can post a question. Anyone with a Google account can answer it, including your competitor, including somebody who visited once in 2023 and half remembers.

Google orders answers by how many people voted them useful, not by whether they came from you. A confident wrong answer with three thumbs up beats the silence of an owner who never opened the tab.

There is no approval step. You are not reliably notified. The wrong answer just sits.

Google Business Profile questions and answers are a page you do not control

Treat the box as content, because that is what it is. It is indexed, it shows in the local panel, and it answers the question a customer had at the exact moment they had it.

The difference is that every other page about your business went through you. This one did not. A Pickering plumber can spend a year writing careful service pages and still find the most read sentence about his business is one a stranger typed in twenty seconds.

Emptiness is not neutral either. A profile with no questions on it looks unattended, in the same way an unanswered review does, and it wastes a slot that could have done real work.

Seed it with the five questions you already answer on the phone

You are allowed to ask and answer your own questions. Google says so plainly. It is not a loophole, it is how the feature was meant to be used.

So take the five things people ring and ask before they book. Not the questions you wish they asked, the real ones. Do you cover my village. How soon can you come out. Do you charge for a quote. Are you insured. Do you take card.

Post each one, answer it properly from the account that manages the profile, and the box now holds five accurate sentences before anybody else gets a turn.

If that list sounds familiar, it is the same list that belongs on your site, which is why the questions customers already ask you make the best FAQ page anyone writes.

Keep the answers short and boring

Two sentences. A number if there is one. No sales language, because answering questions on Google is not advertising space and people read it as reference material.

“We cover Malton, Pickering, Norton and about fifteen miles out. Ring us and we will tell you honestly if you are outside it.” That is the tone.

Check it every few weeks, on the same visit you use for your profile posts. Open the listing on a phone, read what the box currently says about you, correct anything wrong. Reporting a bad answer works, slowly. Adding a better one and picking up a few thumbs up works faster.

Twenty minutes once, five minutes a month after that. Not clever, just done.