Your sales team just lost a deal to a competitor with a worse product and a better wall of badges. The prospect’s procurement lead had a shortlist, and the shortlist came from a G2 category page. Your product sat in the grid with nine reviews, one short of the threshold, so it did not show up at all. That scenario plays out every quarter for B2B software companies, and the fix is less mysterious than most marketers assume.
G2 badges are earned, not bought, and the rules are published. What makes them hard is timing. Reviews have to land in the right category, before the right cutoff, at a steady pace. Below is how the system works and the four-rung plan we use to get a product from invisible to badged. If you came here asking how to get G2 badges, the short answer is reviews in one category, on a steady schedule, landed before each quarterly cutoff. The long answer follows.
How G2 actually awards badges
G2 publishes its scoring rules, and they come down to three thresholds and two scores.
The thresholds first. For a category to get a seasonal Grid report at all, it needs at least six products with 10 or more reviews and at least 150 reviews across the category. For your product to be included in that Grid, it needs at least 10 reviews in that specific category. Reviews in a neighboring category do not count. Live Grids on category pages appear once at least three products have 10 or more reviews.
Then the scores. Every product on a Grid gets a Satisfaction score built from review data, including star ratings, answers to questions like ease of use and likelihood to recommend, review count, and recency. It also gets a Market Presence score built from more than 15 outside signals, such as employee count, web traffic, social following and review volume. Satisfaction runs up the vertical axis and Market Presence runs across.
Badges follow the quadrants. Products in the Leader quadrant (high satisfaction, high presence) and the High Performer quadrant (high satisfaction, lower presence) at the quarterly review deadline get badges automatically. The same logic repeats inside Segment Grids, which split reviews by company size (50 or fewer employees, 51 to 1,000, and more than 1,000), and Regional Grids. Momentum badges go to products showing the strongest growth over the past year.
There is also a badge outside the quarterly system. G2’s Users Love Us badge is earned once a product collects 20 reviews with an average of 4.0 stars or higher, and it is the one badge free profiles can download and display.
Why the 10th review matters more than the 50th
Most companies treat reviews as a volume game. The data says otherwise. The jump from nine reviews to ten in a category is the jump from invisible to listed. Nothing else you do on G2 changes your position as much.
That is why we built what we call the Review Velocity Ladder. It has four rungs, and each one has a single target.
Rung one is Listed: 10 reviews in your primary category. Pick one category, even if your product fits three. Spreading early reviews across categories leaves you short everywhere.
Rung two is Badged: enough satisfaction to clear High Performer in a Segment Grid. Segment Grids are smaller fields, so this is the first badge most products win. If most of your customers have under 50 employees, the Small Business Grid is where your first badge lives.
Rung three is Sustained: a steady flow of new reviews every month so recency weighting works for you, not against you. G2 states that more recent reviews carry more weight, which means a product that collected 40 reviews in one launch push and then stopped will drift down.
Rung four is Leader: moving right on the Market Presence axis. This depends on signals outside G2, like web traffic and press coverage, which is where PR and G2 strategy meet.
That ladder is the whole method for how to get G2 badges without burning out your customers. Climb one rung per quarter. Trying to jump from rung one to rung four in a single season is how teams burn their customer goodwill on a review blitz that fades by the next report.
Time your reviews to the quarterly cutoff
G2 releases seasonal reports four times a year: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Each one has a review submission deadline, and G2 publishes those dates in its Research Agenda. Reviews submitted after the cutoff do not count toward that season’s badges. They roll into the next one.
So the calendar matters. Look up the next cutoff and count back six weeks. Reviews do not publish the moment they are submitted, because G2 runs automated checks and then a manual moderation pass on every review. A review submitted two days before the deadline may not clear in time.
Build your asks around natural moments in the customer lifecycle instead of the deadline alone. The best moments are right after a successful onboarding, after a support ticket closes with a good rating, after a renewal, and after a customer hits a usage milestone. Customers who just had a good experience write better reviews, and better reviews (specific, detailed, honest about trade-offs) score higher than five-star one-liners.
About two weeks before each release, G2 shows draft reports to vendors with access. Use that window to see where you are likely to land, then plan the next quarter’s push rather than scrambling for this one.
How to ask for reviews without breaking the rules
G2 bans review gating, which means you cannot ask only happy customers or screen people with a satisfaction survey first and send the unhappy ones elsewhere. You can, however, choose when to ask. Asking everyone who completed onboarding last month is fine. Asking only the customers who gave you a 9 or 10 on an NPS survey is not.
Incentives have rules too. G2 runs its own review campaigns, and vendors who offer gift cards should follow G2’s published guidelines and disclose the incentive. Never write reviews for customers, never let employees review your product, and never ask a reseller partner to post as a user. G2’s moderation team looks for exactly those patterns, and a flagged product loses more than it gained.
The ask itself should be short. Send a personal note from the account manager, not a marketing blast. Name the specific thing the customer achieved, link directly to your G2 review page, and tell them it takes about ten minutes. Then follow up once, and only once.
Response rates vary by segment. Small business customers tend to respond faster, and enterprise customers often need approval from their legal or procurement team before posting a public review. If your base is mostly enterprise, start the asks earlier.
What a review that scores well looks like
Not every review helps equally. G2’s satisfaction score draws on star ratings plus answers to specific questions, such as ease of use, quality of support and likelihood to recommend, so a reviewer who skips the optional questions contributes less than one who answers them. Detailed written answers also help human buyers, who read reviews closely before they shortlist.
When you send a request, tell customers what makes a useful review: the problem they had before, what changed after adopting the product, and one honest limitation. That last point matters. Reviews that admit a trade-off read as more credible, and buyers trust a 4.6 rating with specific praise and specific complaints more than a wall of identical five-star lines.
Pick the category you can win
The category decision shapes everything else, and most teams make it by accident. A product gets listed in whatever category the founder picked when claiming the profile years ago, and every review since has landed there.
Open your G2 profile and list every category your product could fit. For each one, look at three things on the live category page. First, how many products already have 10 or more reviews. Second, how many reviews the current Leaders have. Third, how many of the products in the High Performer quadrant look like yours in size and price.
A crowded category like CRM or project management has Leaders with thousands of reviews. You will not catch them this year, and you do not need to. A narrower category with a dozen qualified products and Leaders sitting at 60 or 80 reviews is a race you can run in two or three quarters.
There is a trade-off. Narrow categories get less buyer traffic. But a badge in a narrow category still prints on your pricing page, still lands in your sales deck, and still tells a buyer that real customers rate you highly. Traffic is a problem you can fix after you have proof.
If no existing category fits your product well, ask G2 about the options before you build a review plan around a weak fit. Even a new category takes time to reach the 150-review threshold for a full Grid report, so treat that as a long play rather than a shortcut to this quarter’s badge.
Once you choose, check your G2 profile so the product is listed in that category, and mention the use case that matches it in your review requests. Reviews that describe the job your product does in that category are more useful to buyers comparing products there.
Turning badges into pipeline
Knowing how to get G2 badges is half the job. A badge you cannot show is half a badge. G2 generates every earned badge automatically, but downloading and sharing new badges requires a paid profile. Free profiles can display only the Users Love Us badge, though they are still eligible for recognition in the reports. Decide whether the paid profile is worth it after you reach rung two, not before.
Once you have badges, put them where buyers make decisions: the pricing page, the demo request page, sales email signatures, and the last slide of the sales deck. G2’s badge embed links back to your G2 profile, which also lets search engines show star ratings for your landing page in some cases.
Badges also feed the Market Presence axis indirectly. A Leader badge is a news peg. Trade publications in your category cover quarterly G2 results, and an announcement that you moved from High Performer to Leader gives reporters a reason to write about a product they might otherwise ignore. That coverage brings web traffic and brand searches, which are among the presence signals G2 tracks. The loop closes.
So here is the question to take back to your team: which single G2 category are you going to own first, and how many reviews are you short of the 10 that put you on its Grid?