What does a software review site do?
It collects reviews from people who use a product, groups products into categories and shows ratings side by side. Most add comparison pages, category rankings and reports. Buyers read for free. Vendors pay for extras such as an upgraded profile, ads and help collecting reviews.
G2 says it "serves more than 200 million annual buyers". Its product list includes G2 Ads, which put "your brand in front of buyers on G2 category and competitor pages" (G2, read 1 November 2026). The same page says its reviews are not "pay-for-play reports". So the reviews and the paid spots sit on the same pages, and good sites keep the two apart.
Why do review sites matter for B2B SaaS?
Buyers use them to build and check a shortlist. A product with few or old reviews can look like a risk next to one with many recent ones. Review sites also feed the AI answers buyers now read. How much they feed them is where the sources disagree.
Do AI assistants cite review sites?
Yes, but the numbers depend on who measured. G2 says it "has become the most-cited B2B software source across those AI-first channels where software discovery happens" (G2, read 1 November 2026). G2 does not show the data behind that line on its About page.
Prefer checked 188 answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude in July 2026. Review sites like G2 got 3% of the 1,237 citations. Independent lists got 40%, vendors' own sites 34%. Even so, g2.com was the fourth most-cited single domain, after Reddit, YouTube and Zapier.
Both can be true: one review site can be cited often while review sites as a group are a small share. One study of 47 questions is not the whole market. See AI citation and brand mention.
What rules apply to reviews?
In the US, the FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, August 2024) bans fake reviews. It also bans paying for reviews "expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative" (§ 465.4, read 1 November 2026). Asking for honest reviews is a different thing from paying for good ones.
On rankings, the FTC Endorsement Guides give the example of a review site that takes money for higher rankings: "such paid-for rankings are deceptive" (16 CFR 255.4, read 1 November 2026). This is our reading of US rules, not legal advice.
How should a SaaS company work with review sites? (hypothetical example)
- A scheduling tool claims its free profile on two review sites and fills in pricing, screenshots and category.
- After onboarding, it emails every new customer once and asks for an honest review, good or bad.
- It offers no reward tied to the rating and answers critical reviews in public.
- Each quarter it checks the review site pages that rank for its category, and the AI answers that cite them, for wrong facts.
Review site vs list article
- A review site gathers many user reviews. A best-of list is one writer's ranked pick.
- A review site covers every vendor in a category. A list covers a few and explains why.
- Both get cited by assistants for buyer questions, in Prefer's study at very different rates.
Go deeper: LLM SEO: how B2B SaaS brands get named in AI answers.