How to Get on G2 and Capterra as a New Startup

Somewhere in the last year, "get on G2 and Capterra" became the standard advice for any software company that wants to show up in AI answers. It's half right. The half that's wrong will cost you three months chasing a review count that doesn't do what you think it does.

The short version: getting listed is close to mandatory, because almost every tool an AI assistant names has a profile on both. Getting more reviews past the listing minimum does almost nothing for how AI ranks you, and the review sites themselves are almost never the page that gets cited. Clear the gate cheaply, then spend your real effort elsewhere. This piece covers both halves.

Do G2 and Capterra still matter for a startup with no customers?

Yes, but as an entry ticket rather than a growth channel. In a 2026 study of B2B SaaS recommendations, 100% of the tools ChatGPT named had a Capterra profile and 99% had G2 reviews. A product with zero presence on either almost never got named at all. That's a strong signal, and it's cheap to act on, which is why it belongs on your list.

What it isn't is proof that reviews caused the recommendations. Established tools tend to have both review profiles and piles of third-party coverage, so presence may just mark a company that's been around long enough to accumulate everything else. Treat it as a credibility check you want to pass, not a lever you can pull.

The practical read for an early-stage startup: claim the profiles now, while it costs you an afternoon. Do it before you have ten customers, so that when you do, the machinery for asking them already exists.

G2 now owns Capterra, and that changes where you start

This is the fact most 2025-era advice misses. G2 acquired Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice from Gartner, and the deal closed on February 5, 2026. The three former Gartner properties are now grouped under "G2 Digital Markets."

Same parent company, two entirely separate systems. As of mid-2026 there are two vendor logins, two billing relationships, two category taxonomies, and critically, two separate review pools. A review you collect on G2.com does not appear on Capterra. A review collected on Capterra does not appear on G2. Syndication between them is the obvious next integration and it has not shipped.

What follows from that is a real strategic choice, and the answer is not "do both." Splitting ten reviews across two ecosystems gives you two profiles that clear nothing. Concentrate on one:

• Start with Capterra (and therefore G2 Digital Markets) if you sell to small businesses or your buyers find software by browsing category pages. One review submitted to Capterra, GetApp, or Software Advice appears on all three automatically. One effort, three surfaces.
• Start with G2 if you sell to technically fluent or mid-market buyers. G2 reviews syndicate out to AWS Marketplace, Azure, and other procurement surfaces, which matters if your buyer evaluates software through a cloud marketplace.

If you already have momentum on one, stay there. Switching forfeits everything you've collected.

How to get listed on G2, step by step

The submission is free and takes about twenty minutes. Go to the G2 profile creation form at sell.g2.com, and pay attention to three things most people get wrong.

Check the admin box. The form asks whether you'd like to serve as admin for the profile. Say yes. Otherwise your profile gets approved and you then have to file a separate claim to control it.

Use a work email. Gmail addresses get rejected. If you're a solo founder running off a personal address, set up the domain email first.

Expect three to five business days. A human reviews it. They open your site, check your LinkedIn company page, and look up the domain WHOIS. A thin landing page with no company entity behind it is the usual reason for rejection, so ship a real site first.

Once live, the free plan lets you hold a profile and collect reviews. Responding to reviews publicly, displaying G2 badges, and accessing analytics sit behind a paid plan. Capterra's equivalent badges are free to display with attribution, which is a real difference for a bootstrapped company. Don't buy a G2 plan until you have ten reviews and a reason.

How to get listed on Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice

Register once with G2 Digital Markets, then claim each of the three sites separately from inside that dashboard. They share a login and a billing relationship but they are three distinct listings, and each can carry its own description and screenshots.

The payoff for that extra clicking is the best effort-to-surface ratio in the category: one review lands on all three sites at once. GetApp skews more European and more technical, Software Advice routes buyers through phone-qualified advisor introductions, and Capterra is the broad small-business front door that ranks for "best [category] software" in Google.

One piece of housekeeping that confuses everyone: you will still get emails branded "Gartner Digital Markets" for password resets and support. The rebrand is rolling out in stages. It's not phishing.

The review thresholds that actually exist

Every number worth knowing is published by the platforms themselves. Everything else you read is someone's guess.

What it unlocks	Platform	Requirement	Window
Plotted on a category Grid report	G2	10 reviews in that category	Rolling
Live Grid shown on a category page	G2	Category needs 3+ products with 10+ reviews	Updated daily
Category qualifies for a Grid report	G2	6+ products with 10+ reviews, 150+ reviews total	Rolling
Eligible for the Shortlist	Capterra	20 unique reviews	Trailing 24 months

Ten. Not fifty. You'll see "you need at least 50 reviews on G2 to appear in Grid Reports" repeated in a lot of agency blog posts, including ones published this month. G2's own documentation says ten in the relevant category. If you're budgeting effort, budget for ten.

Two details hide in that table. First, G2 counts reviews by category, so a review filed under the wrong category does nothing for the Grid you actually compete in. Check which category your reviewer selected. Second, Capterra's window is the trailing 24 months, which means Shortlist eligibility decays. A burst of twenty reviews in 2024 does not keep you qualified in 2026. A slow trickle beats a one-time push.

How to get your first ten reviews without breaking the rules

Ten reviews from a customer base of thirty is not a marketing campaign, it's about forty personal emails. Plan it that way. A well-run program converts roughly 15 to 30 percent of invitations into published reviews, so to land ten you should be asking forty to sixty people.

The sequence that works:

1. Pick people who've hit a win. Someone three to six months in who just finished onboarding, closed out a good support ticket, or told you something nice in a call. Value has to be fresh.
2. Send a direct link. Not "we're on G2." A one-click URL to your review page. Every extra step drops your conversion.
3. Ask once, remind once. First ask within a day of the positive signal, one nudge a week later, then stop.
4. Route unhappy customers somewhere else. If someone is frustrated, that's a customer success conversation, not a public profile. This isn't about hiding criticism, it's about not manufacturing it.

On incentives, the rules are clearer than founders assume. Both platforms let you offer a thank-you for the act of writing a review. G2 caps incentive value at $100 and tags incentivized reviews as such; $10 to $25 is the normal amount. What's prohibited is conditioning the reward on sentiment. You cannot pay for a good review, and you cannot withhold payment for a bad one. Offer it to everyone who submits, disclose it, and you're fine.

Reply to every negative review once you can. Buyers read the response more carefully than the complaint.

Why more reviews won't get you recommended by ChatGPT

Here's the part that should change how you spend the next quarter. Once you clear the listing minimums, review volume stops predicting anything about AI visibility, and the data is unusually blunt about it.

A 2026 analysis measured review count against where ChatGPT ranked tools in its answers. The correlation was weakly negative: Capterra at -0.21, G2 at -0.16. Average rating was effectively noise (Capterra +0.02, G2 -0.11). Asked for Notion alternatives, ChatGPT put Coda at number three on 97 Capterra reviews and ClickUp at number four on roughly 4,490. A 46x difference in review count bought a worse position.

Then it gets stranger. DerivateX ran 40 B2B SaaS categories through ChatGPT with web search enabled, ten times each, and logged all 233 recommendations and every source credited. Review aggregators accounted for 0.9% of all citations. G2 and Capterra each got exactly zero. Independent and niche blogs plus vendor-owned content took 81.9%. Reddit was the single most-cited domain in the whole study.

So the review profile does quiet background work: it signals you're a real company so the engine is willing to name you. The visible citation, the link a buyer actually clicks, comes from somewhere else entirely. If you want the mechanics of how citation and ranking came apart, we covered that in how to get your startup cited by ChatGPT.

One caveat worth stating: that study measured one engine on one query type at one point in time. Treat the direction as solid and the exact percentages as a snapshot.

What to do instead once you've cleared the gates

Publish the definitive list for your own category, on your own domain, and be fair to your competitors in it.

The DerivateX study found that the vendors winning citations were frequently the ones who'd written the ranked roundup of their own market. Procurify runs a "Best Procurement Software" post on its blog that ranks Procurify well and lists competitors accurately. ChatGPT used that one page as the cited source for five different brand recommendations inside a single procurement answer. Zapier, Mercury, and Front are all running the same play in their categories.

The format matters as much as the content. Of the cited pages the study retrieved and analyzed: 100% used list structure, 78% carried the current year in the title, 68% included a comparison table, and 56% had an FAQ section. Domain authority was not the differentiator. Small, narrowly focused sites outperformed household names, which is the entire opening for a startup with a two-year-old domain.

That's the whole strategy, and it's cheaper than a G2 Enterprise plan:

• Claim your profiles and get to ten or twenty reviews. Stop there.
• Write the "best [your category] tools in 2026" page yourself. Include competitors, with real pricing and real trade-offs. A roundup that only flatters you gets read as marketing and cited by nobody.
• Add a comparison table and an FAQ. Put the year in the title. Refresh it monthly.
• Answer questions in the communities where your category gets discussed, because Reddit threads are getting cited more than every review site combined.
• Build things people link to on their own. We've written about free tools as a distribution channel, and Foundra's own free tools exist as much for that reason as for the signups.

Scope it to one category at a time. In that same study, 94% of the 219 tools analyzed appeared in only a single category. There's no such thing as brand-wide AI visibility. There's only winning the specific question your buyer types.

Key takeaways

• Presence on G2 and Capterra is close to mandatory: 100% of ChatGPT-recommended tools in a 2026 study had a Capterra profile, 99% had G2 reviews.
• G2 bought Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice from Gartner on February 5, 2026. Two separate cabinets, two separate review pools, no syndication yet. Pick one ecosystem and concentrate.
• The real thresholds are 10 category reviews for a G2 Grid and 20 reviews in 24 months for a Capterra Shortlist. The "you need 50" claim is wrong.
• Incentives are allowed for the act of reviewing, capped at $100 on G2, never conditioned on sentiment.
• Past the minimums, review volume correlates weakly negatively with ChatGPT ranking (-0.21 Capterra, -0.16 G2).
• Review sites supplied 0.9% of citations across 233 software recommendations. G2 and Capterra each got zero.
• The highest-leverage move is publishing the current, fair, well-structured ranked list of your own category. One such page earned citations for five different brands in a single answer.

FAQ

How many reviews do I need to show up on a G2 category page?

Ten reviews in that specific category gets your product plotted on the category Grid. G2 displays a live Grid on a category page once at least three products each have ten or more reviews, and a category qualifies for a formal Grid report when six or more products have ten-plus reviews and the category has 150 or more reviews total. Reviews filed under a different category don't count toward the Grid you care about.

Is Capterra still owned by Gartner?

No. G2 acquired Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice from Gartner in a deal that closed February 5, 2026. They now operate as G2 Digital Markets. The vendor dashboard is still separate from G2.com's, with its own login, its own billing, and its own review pool, and some support emails still carry Gartner branding while the rebrand rolls out.

Will my G2 reviews show up on Capterra now that they're the same company?

Not yet, and there's no announced date. Reviews collected on G2 stay on G2. Reviews collected on any one of Capterra, GetApp, or Software Advice appear on all three of those automatically. This is the main reason to concentrate your review collection on one ecosystem rather than splitting it.

Can I offer a gift card for a G2 review?

Yes, within limits. G2 caps incentive value at $100 and automatically labels reviews that came through an incentivized campaign. The reward has to be for submitting a review, not for submitting a positive one, and you have to honor it regardless of what the review says. Ten to twenty-five dollars is the typical amount, and conditioning the reward on a good rating violates the community guidelines on both platforms.

If reviews don't drive AI recommendations, why collect them at all?

Because absence is disqualifying even though abundance isn't rewarded. Nearly every tool AI names has review profiles, and products with none rarely appear. Reviews also convert human buyers, who read them far more carefully than any model does. Collect enough to clear the listing floors, keep them fresh, and then put the next hundred hours into the comparison content that actually earns the citation. More of our thinking on early distribution is in the Foundra key reads library.