Google is answering questions about your plumbing company now, using your reviews
Google has wound down the old Q and A box and lets AI answer customer questions from your profile, site and reviews. What that changes for a plumber.
A homeowner looks at your Google listing and wants to know one thing before calling: do you do tankless water heaters, and do you come out on Sundays. They used to scroll to a Questions and Answers box that you may or may not have filled in. Increasingly, Google's own AI answers that question for them.
Google has been winding down the old Questions and Answers section on Business Profiles. In its place, on more and more listings, people can ask a question and get a written answer that Google assembles from what it can find about your company: the fields on your profile, the text on your website, and what your customers wrote in their reviews.
That last part is the change worth paying attention to. Your reviews are no longer just social proof. They are source material.
What this changes for a plumbing company
You do not control the answer directly. Under the old system, you could post your own question and answer it, and that text sat on the profile. Now the answer is generated. If your profile, website and reviews do not mention tankless installs, the AI has nothing to say yes with.
Specific reviews beat generic ones. A review that says "great service, very professional" gives the AI almost nothing. A review that says "replaced our 50-gallon water heater with a Navien tankless in Katy, same day" answers three questions at once: the service, the brand, the town.
Blank profile fields become wrong answers. If your hours are missing, the AI cannot answer "are they open Sunday". Across 77,218 plumbing listings in our data, 39.4% show no hours. Only 29.1% list Sunday hours. If you take Sunday calls and do not say so, you lose that question by default.
What to do this month
Fill every profile field as if it were the FAQ. Hours, including special holiday hours. Every service as its own entry with a one-line description: drain cleaning, water heater repair and replacement, tankless installs, sewer line repair, leak detection, repiping, gas lines. Your service area towns. Your business description, opening with a sentence that names your top services, your towns, and whether you handle emergencies. The profile guide walks through each field.
Shape the review ask so customers say what they had done. You cannot script reviews, and you should not. But you can make specifics easy. When the tech asks at the door, they can say: "If you leave us a Google review, it really helps if you mention what we fixed and what town you are in." That one sentence turns vague five-star reviews into answers. The full door script and text template are in the reviews guide.
Reply to reviews with the details. Owner replies are text Google can read too. "Thanks, Maria. Glad we got the tankless in before the cold weather hit Katy." Keep it natural, two sentences, and never repeat anything private about the job.
Put your answers on your website. A short FAQ section on your service pages answers the questions the AI is being asked: do you charge a trip fee, do you work weekends, what brands of water heater you install, whether you offer financing. One plain sentence per answer. The AI search guide explains why plain sentences get quoted and design-heavy pages do not.
Check what Google says about you. Search your company name on your phone and look for any question box on your profile. Ask it the three questions your callers ask most. If the answers are wrong or empty, the fix is almost always one of the four steps above.
The volume side still matters
Specific reviews need a lot of reviews to show up in. The median plumbing company has 21 reviews and 52.6% have fewer than 25. A company with 20 reviews has very little for an AI to quote. A company with 200, a good share of them naming specific jobs and towns, has a full answer bank.
The websites matter too. Plumbing companies that link a site carry a median of 39 reviews, against 6 for those that do not. The busier companies are the ones giving Google the most to read.
What it does not change
The fundamentals did not move. Google still ranks the map on relevance, distance and prominence, and reviews and a complete profile still feed all three. The homeowner still decides in the first 20 seconds of the call. If you miss the call, none of this helps. Check the calculator if you want to see what that costs.
What changed is that every field you skipped and every vague review is now a question Google answers for you, and not always the way you would.
If you want the profile, review flow and service page FAQs set up for you, any service is available as a free 14-day trial, no card. Text or call (346) 436-6274.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, plumbing companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor