AI assistants cite G2 pages because they combine what an answer about software needs: many independent opinions, structured facts like categories, features and pricing, and pages that rank for the “best X” and “X vs Y” searches assistants run. To improve your AI visibility through G2, find the G2 pages that assistants actually cite for your buyers’ prompts, keep your profile complete and current, and ask a broad range of real customers for honest reviews, following G2’s rules on incentives. Never write, buy or filter reviews.
This guide is the practical version: how to find the cited G2 pages by hand, what to fix on your profile, a complete review request campaign you can adapt (email, in-app message and follow-up), and how to measure the effect. Our broader guide on getting cited through review sites, Reddit and comparisons covers the other channels.
Key takeaways
- Review pages are frequent sources for software recommendation prompts because they’re independent, structured and specific.
- G2 has several kinds of pages (category pages, product profiles, comparisons, alternatives). Find out which ones assistants cite for your prompts before acting.
- A complete, accurate profile matters as much as the reviews: outdated pricing on a review page can end up in AI answers.
- Ask every eligible customer, not only happy ones, at moments when they’ve seen real value. Suggest topics, never wording.
- Incentives, if any, must never depend on the review being positive. Reviews from people who aren’t real customers break platform rules and, in the US, the FTC’s rule on fake reviews.
Why review pages get cited
How each assistant ranks its sources isn’t public, so treat these as observed patterns. We cover the general mechanics in how AI assistants choose sources.
- Independence. “Easy to set up for a small team”, written by dozens of customers, is stronger evidence than the same sentence on a vendor’s site.
- Structure. Review platforms organize products by category, with features, pricing and ratings in predictable places. That makes facts easy to extract and compare.
- Specificity. Good reviews mention team size, use case, integrations and what went wrong. Those details match the constraints buyers put in prompts.
- Search visibility. Category and comparison pages tend to rank for exactly the searches an assistant runs when it fans a prompt out into queries like “best client portal software for agencies”. Our explainer on query fan-out shows why that matters.
The consequence: for “best X for Y” prompts, a review platform can shape the shortlist more than your own site does.
Which G2 pages matter
G2 publishes several types of pages, and they play different roles in answers:
| G2 page | What it shows | Prompts it tends to feed |
|---|---|---|
| Category page | Products ranked in a category | “Best X”, “top X for Y” |
| Product profile and reviews | Ratings, reviews, features, pricing | “Is X good?”, “X pros and cons” |
| Comparison page | Two or more products side by side | “X vs Y” |
| Alternatives page | Products compared to a named one | “Alternatives to X” |
Don’t assume the category page is the one that matters. A G2 alternatives page for your biggest competitor that lists three rivals and not you is a much more concrete gap, and you only find it by looking at real citations.
Step 1: Find the G2 pages assistants cite, by hand
You can do this with a spreadsheet and an afternoon.
- Pick 10 to 20 buyer prompts. Category questions, “alternatives to [competitor]” and head-to-head comparisons, mostly without your brand name. Our guide on choosing prompts to track explains how.
- Run each prompt in several assistants. ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot all show sources. Run each prompt at least twice: answers vary from one run to the next.
- Copy every g2.com URL from the cited sources, one row per citation.
- Note what the answer says. Is your brand named? Which competitors are named?
- Group by URL and count.
Use these columns:
| Column | Example value |
|---|---|
| Prompt | best client portal for a small agency |
| Assistant | Perplexity |
| Run date | 2026-10-06 |
| G2 URL | The G2 alternatives page for Taskhive |
| G2 page type | Category, profile, comparison or alternatives |
| You named in the answer? | No |
| Competitors named | Taskhive, Planwise, Flowbench |
| You listed on the G2 page itself? | No |
The last column matters. Sometimes you’re on the G2 page but the answer still skips you (a review or profile problem); sometimes you’re not on the page at all (a category or comparison problem). The fix differs.
A worked example: Brightloop
Brightloop is a client portal for agencies. Its competitors are Taskhive, Planwise, Orbitask and Flowbench. All five brands are fictional, and the numbers below are illustrative. After two weeks of runs on 15 prompts, its G2 rows might group like this:
| Cited G2 page | Page type | Share of answers citing it | Of those, answers that skip Brightloop | Competitors named alongside | Brightloop on the page? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Client portal software category | Category | 34% | 80% | Taskhive, Planwise, Orbitask | Yes, low in the list |
| Taskhive alternatives | Alternatives | 21% | 100% | Planwise, Flowbench | No |
| Taskhive vs Planwise | Comparison | 12% | 100% | Taskhive, Planwise | No |
| Brightloop profile and reviews | Profile | 8% | 25% | Taskhive | Yes |
Read it row by row:
- The category page is used most, and Brightloop is on it but rarely makes the answer. That points to the reviews: few, old or vague about agency use cases.
- The alternatives page never names Brightloop. Check the profile’s categories and competitor settings first, then invite reviews from customers who switched from Taskhive.
- The comparison page is between two competitors. You can’t add yourself to it, but customers who evaluated both can mention that in honest reviews, and you can publish a fair comparison of your own.
- The profile is rarely cited and usually names Brightloop when it is. It’s not the priority, but its facts must be right, because it’s what assistants read when someone asks about Brightloop directly.
A source gap analysis ranks these G2 rows alongside your other gaps, such as forums, roundups and videos.
Step 2: Audit your profile before asking anyone
Fix what you control first. Reviews pointing to a profile with the wrong category or last year’s pricing waste the effort.
- The profile is claimed and someone on your team owns it
- Categories match the category pages that assistants cite for your prompts
- The one-line description says who the product is for, in the same words as your homepage
- Pricing matches your pricing page, plan names included
- Integrations are listed and current
- Features you retired are gone; features you launched are there
- Screenshots show the current interface
- Deployment, languages and support options are filled in
- Recent reviews have a reply, especially critical ones
If G2 says “for enterprises” and your homepage says “for agencies of 5 to 50 people”, assistants have to reconcile conflicting signals. Pick one and make both match.
Step 3: Decide who to ask, and when
Who to ask
Invite a broad cross-section of active customers: different sizes, roles and use cases, including people who’ve raised issues. Asking only your happiest customers (sometimes called review gating) is against the rules of many review platforms, and it produces a profile that reads as curated.
When to ask
Tie each request to a moment when a customer has seen real value or had a real interaction:
| Trigger | Channel | Who sends it |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding complete, team active for 30 days | Customer success manager | |
| A support ticket resolved and closed | In-app message after closure | Support |
| First client invited to the portal | In-app message | Product (automated) |
| Renewal or annual check-in | Account owner | |
| Detailed feedback shared on a call or in a survey | Whoever received the feedback | |
| No answer to the first request after a week | Follow-up email | Same sender as the first email |
Space requests out. A customer should get one request and one follow-up, not a sequence.
Step 4: Tell customers what’s useful to mention, not what to say
Detailed reviews help readers, and they’re also the reviews that carry the specifics assistants repeat. You can legitimately point customers toward topics without scripting the content. Derive those topics from the answers you collected in step 1: the criteria assistants use to build the shortlist.
For Brightloop, the answers to “best client portal for a small agency” kept comparing tools on client access, white-labelling, file approvals and pricing per seat. So the request suggests:
- the size of their agency and how many clients use the portal
- what they used before, if anything
- how clients access and approve work
- what’s still missing or frustrating
Suggest topics as questions, not as phrases to copy. Never suggest a rating, adjectives or a comparison with a named competitor.
Step 5: Send the campaign
Here’s a complete campaign for Brightloop. Replace the bracketed parts, and keep it short and neutral.
The email
Subject: Would you share your honest experience with Brightloop?
Hi Sam,
You’ve been running client work in Brightloop for a couple of months now. Would you write a short, honest review on G2? Agencies comparing client portals read these reviews, and so do the AI assistants they ask for recommendations. Good and critical feedback both help, and both help us improve.
If you’re not sure what to write about, other agencies usually want to know:
- how big your team is and how many clients use the portal
- what you used before
- how your clients find access and approvals
- what’s still missing
It takes about five minutes: [review link]
Thanks either way, Alex, Customer success at Brightloop
The in-app message
Shown once, after a positive moment such as a closed support ticket or a first client invited, and easy to dismiss.
Help other agencies choose
Got five minutes? An honest review of Brightloop on G2, good or critical, helps agencies compare client portals. [Write a review] [Not now]
The follow-up, about a week later
Subject: Re: Would you share your honest experience with Brightloop?
Hi Sam, a quick nudge in case my last email got buried. If you have five minutes, an honest review on G2 would help other agencies: [review link]. If now isn’t a good time, no problem, and I won’t ask again.
Alex
Note what none of these say: no “five-star”, no “if you’re happy with us”, no suggested sentences, no reward tied to a rating.
Incentives
G2’s community guidelines describe incentives such as gift cards that don’t depend on whether a review is positive or negative. If you offer anything, follow the platform’s current rules, make it available regardless of sentiment and let the platform handle disclosure. In the US, the FTC’s final rule on fake reviews and testimonials bans fake reviews, including AI-generated ones, and prohibits paying for reviews that express a particular sentiment.
What never to do
- Write reviews yourself, or with AI, in anyone’s name.
- Buy reviews, directly or through a service.
- Ask employees, friends or investors to review as if they were customers.
- Filter who you ask by how happy you think they are, for example by sending the request only to customers who scored you highly in a survey.
- Trade reviews with other vendors.
- Suggest wording or ask customers to change a critical review.
- Gate the reward: anything offered only for a good rating.
Besides breaking rules, these tactics produce reviews without the specific, first-hand detail that makes a review page worth citing in the first place.
Step 6: Respond to reviews, especially critical ones
Reply to recent reviews. A factual, polite reply that explains what changed adds context for readers, and anything on the page may be read by an assistant. Don’t argue, and don’t disclose customer details.
Say a review reads: “The portal is clean but clients couldn’t approve files from their phones, which was a dealbreaker for two of our accounts.” A good reply:
Thanks for the detailed review. You’re right that file approvals didn’t work well on mobile when you wrote this. We shipped mobile approvals in September; if you’d like to try it with one of those accounts, reply here or write to support and we’ll help set it up.
It acknowledges the problem, states a dated fact and offers a next step. It doesn’t ask the reviewer to change anything. Only write “we shipped” if you did.
Beyond G2
G2 isn’t the only review platform, and it isn’t always the one cited in your category. Capterra, product marketplaces, app stores and niche directories can matter more for some prompts. Run the same spreadsheet exercise without filtering on g2.com: the cited sources for your own prompts tell you which platforms deserve the effort, and the campaign above works for any of them with the link swapped.
Step 7: Measure the effect
Reviews accumulate slowly, and pages are re-crawled at their own pace. Re-run the same prompts every week or two for at least two months and track, per G2 page:
- whether the page now lists or mentions you
- the share of answers citing it that also name you
- which competitors are still named alongside
Keep the prompts fixed, or you lose the baseline. If you want to see how you compare with competitors over time, AI share of voice explains how to read the trend.
Doing this in Citegram
The spreadsheet above is what Citegram builds for you. It runs your prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Mistral, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and the G2 tab in source analytics lists every G2 page cited, with Used (the share of answers citing it), Without you (the answers citing it that don’t name you), the competitors named alongside and a gap score from 0 to 100 that rises when a page is used often, skips you and names competitors.
From a G2 page, Content studio can draft a review request campaign (about 250 words): an email and an in-app message asking real customers for an honest review on G2, or on the review site assistants cite most, a list of what’s useful to mention taken from the use cases assistants care about, a review link placeholder and a follow-up email. It never writes reviews, and it doesn’t send anything: you edit the draft, choose who receives it and send it yourself. See source analytics and Content studio.
FAQ
Does ChatGPT use G2 reviews?
ChatGPT can cite G2 pages when it searches the web, and review platforms often appear among the sources for software recommendation prompts. OpenAI doesn’t publish how it weighs individual sources, so check which G2 pages appear for your own prompts.
Can I offer an incentive for G2 reviews?
Only within G2’s current rules: G2 describes incentives that don’t depend on whether a review is positive or negative. Never make a reward conditional on a good rating, and in the US, the FTC’s rule prohibits paying for reviews that express a particular sentiment.
How many G2 reviews do I need to show up in AI answers?
There’s no known threshold. What matters is whether the G2 pages assistants cite for your prompts mention you, and whether your reviews are recent and specific. Work on the pages that appear in your cited sources and measure the trend.
Should I ask only satisfied customers for reviews?
No. Selecting reviewers by expected sentiment is against the rules of many platforms and produces a less credible profile. Invite a broad range of real customers and respond to critical reviews.
Can I tell customers what to write?
You can suggest topics that help readers, like team size, use case or what’s missing. Don’t suggest ratings, phrases or comparisons, and never edit or pre-write a review.
See which review pages shape your category
The free plan tracks 1 prompt on 1 assistant with the top 2 cited sources, forever. Pro adds 20 prompts, all 9 assistants, every cited source and page with a gap score, the G2, Reddit and YouTube tabs, and Content studio to draft review request campaigns (email, in-app message and follow-up), for $19 a month. See pricing.
