You ask ChatGPT for the best tool in your category, and it names four competitors. You are not one of them.
That stings, and it also tells you exactly where to look. The answer came from somewhere, and for software questions that somewhere is usually a review profile you already control. This guide shows you how to optimize review sites for AI so your G2 and Capterra pages start feeding the answers instead of sitting there. By the end you will know which fields carry weight, how many reviews you actually need, and how to check whether G2 AI citations are landing for you.
What you need: admin access to your profiles, an hour for the first audit, and a little patience.
Why your review profiles quietly became AI sources
Something odd happened over the last two years. Organic clicks to the big software review platforms collapsed, with the largest of them losing the great majority of their search traffic. The same profiles became some of the most frequently cited software sources inside AI answers.
The traffic left. The authority stayed.
At the same time, buyer behavior moved. Most B2B software buyers now reach for an AI chatbot before they reach for Google, a share that has climbed fast in under a year. Half of them trust the answer enough to act on it without opening a single source link.
Read that again. The answer is the destination now. If you are not in it, you are not in the consideration set.
Here is what that means for you. When someone asks an engine for the best CRM for a fifty-person team, the model is not reading your homepage. It is pulling category descriptions, feature lists, pricing tiers, and review excerpts from the software review profiles AI answers are built on. Those fields are editable. By you. Today.
A quick scope note before we start. This guide covers B2B software review platforms only: G2, Capterra, Software Advice, GetApp, TrustRadius, Gartner Peer Insights, and Software Finder. Consumer marketplaces and local listing profiles play by different rules and belong in their own playbook.
Seven platforms carry the large majority of review-driven AI citations in software queries. That is a small, finite list. You can actually finish this.
Step 1: Audit which review sites AI search engines cite for you
Before you touch a single field, find out what the engines already say.
Write 15 to 25 buyer-intent prompts. Not brand prompts. Buyer prompts, in the words your buyers use: "best help desk software for a 20-person team," "Tool A vs Tool B," "cheapest project management tool with Jira integration."
Run each one across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode. Log three things per answer: which brands got named, which domains got cited, and which exact profile URLs appeared.
You are looking for a pattern, and it will show up fast. G2 tends to dominate ChatGPT citations for software questions and sits near the top in Google AI Mode. Perplexity leans hardest on Reddit but still pulls review profiles for comparison queries. Claude cites less often and weights each citation more heavily, because it favors sources with clear authorship, a named organization, and a dated update.
If your bandwidth is thin, track G2 AI citations first. That one signal moves earliest and tells you the most.
How to tell it is done: you have a spreadsheet with one row per prompt and columns for engine, brands named, domains cited, and URLs cited. You can point to the exact queries where a competitor's profile appears and yours does not.
Where people go wrong: running five prompts once and calling it a baseline. Answers vary run to run. You need enough prompts, run the same way, to see a pattern rather than noise. A repeatable, versioned prompt set is what turns this from a one-time curiosity into a measurement you can trust.
This is the part teams tend to postpone because it feels manual, and it is. DeepSmith runs this loop for you: you define the buyer prompts, it checks them on a schedule across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Mode, and reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, and the sources AI cites most, with a competitor leaderboard beside them.
Step 2: Claim and verify every profile that matters
You cannot edit what you do not own. Start there.
Claim all seven: G2, Capterra, Software Advice, GetApp, TrustRadius, Gartner Peer Insights, and Software Finder. Verify ownership on each. Assign one internal owner by name, not a team alias, and put a refresh cadence on the calendar.
A few of these are connected in ways worth knowing. Software Advice, GetApp, and Software Finder syndicate within the Gartner Digital Markets network, so an edit in one place can propagate. Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp came under G2 ownership in an acquisition announced in January 2026, though how the platforms integrate operationally is not public yet.
Two platforms deserve a note on fit. TrustRadius uses a Bayesian-adjusted TR Score that deliberately dampens review-volume spikes, so bursts do not help you there. Gartner Peer Insights only accepts reviews from verified end users, vetted by Gartner, which makes it slower to build and heavier when it lands. Both skew mid-market to enterprise.
How to tell it is done: every profile shows a verified vendor badge, and one person's name sits next to each in your tracker.
Where people go wrong: claiming G2 and stopping. Coverage across several platforms multiplies your citation surface, and the smaller platforms are far less contested.
Step 3: Lock one identity across every profile
AI engines are trying to resolve a question before they answer yours: is this all the same company?
Conflicting facts make that harder, and a model that cannot confidently resolve your identity tends to reach for a competitor it can. So give it nothing to be confused about.
Lock these across all seven profiles:
- Product name, exactly as buyers say it, plus common aliases if they materially differ
- Tagline and short description, mirrored word for word
- Vendor details: founding year, HQ city and country, headcount, ownership type
- Categories and subcategories
- Logo and screenshots, current and consistent
- Name, address, phone, and website, identical everywhere
How to tell it is done: you can open all seven profiles side by side and the identity block reads the same on every one.
Where people go wrong: letting profiles drift. Pricing changes on your site, gets updated on G2, and stays stale on GetApp for a year. Every contradiction is a small vote against your entity authority, and keeping brand facts consistent across the web is the cheapest authority work available to you.
Pro tip: keep one canonical fact sheet in a shared doc. Every profile edit copies from it. Never the other way around.
Step 4: Rewrite your descriptions so engines can extract them
Most vendor descriptions read like a billboard. Engines do not quote billboards. They quote answers.
Rewrite yours in three layers.
The tagline is your shortest promise: category, audience, benefit. Something like "a sales pipeline tool for SaaS revenue teams of 10 to 100 people." Plain, specific, boring in the best way.
The short description follows a simple formula: X is a [category] for [audience] that [benefit]. Front-load the use case and the audience. That first line does a lot of the work.
The long description runs 300 to 800 words and answers six questions in order: what is it, who is it for, what problem does it solve, how is it deployed, what does it integrate with, and what support is included. Engines extract the first paragraph or two most aggressively, so put the real answers in the first 200 words.
How to tell it is done: read your first paragraph aloud. If it answers "what is this and who is it for" without adjectives, you are there.
Where people go wrong: writing for a human browsing the page instead of a model extracting a sentence. Both readers are served by clarity. Only one is served by flair.
Step 5: Fill every structured field on the profile
This is the least glamorous step and probably the highest return. Structured fields are where engines go first, because they are unambiguous.
Features. Use parallel grammar so the list scans as a set: "Automated lead routing," "Real-time pipeline analytics," "Native Salesforce sync." Mirror the feature names your competitors use, so an engine matching a buyer's phrasing can match yours too.
Pricing. Populate the starting price, the billing cadence, and what each tier includes. Every "best tool under $50" answer runs on this field. Leave it blank and you are simply not eligible.
Integrations. Name each product exactly as its vendor brands it: Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira. Close enough is not close enough here.
Categories. Pick the most specific applicable subcategory, not the broadest one. Broad categories are crowded; specific ones are winnable.
Everything else. Languages supported, deployment options, support hours, supported devices. If the field exists and applies to you, fill it.
Capterra AEO work follows the same shape with a few extras. The curated pros and cons block gets heavily extracted, so read yours and make sure it is accurate. Opt into every relevant alternatives and head-to-head comparison page. Inclusion in Capterra Shortlist reports, like Top Rated or Best Value, gives engines something concrete to quote in ranking-style answers, and G2 badges do the same job.
How to tell it is done: your profile completeness score reads 100%, and no applicable field is empty.
Where people go wrong: treating structured fields as an afterthought while polishing the prose above them. It is backwards. The fields are the citation.
Step 6: Write the FAQ block your buyers actually ask
The vendor FAQ is the single highest-extraction field on a G2 profile, and it is one of the most underused.
Write 5 to 10 questions in real buyer language. Not "What makes us different?" More like "Does it integrate with Salesforce?", "What does implementation take?", "Is there a free tier?", "How does pricing scale past 50 seats?"
Answer each in two or three sentences. Lead with the answer. Add the qualifier after.
Match these questions to the FAQ block on your own product page too. When an engine sees the same question answered the same way in two places, that agreement reads as confidence.
How to tell it is done: every question you get on a sales call in the first ten minutes has an answer on the profile.
Where people go wrong: writing questions you wish buyers asked instead of the ones they do. Pull them from your sales team's inbox, not from a brainstorm.
Step 7: Build steady review velocity and reply in public
Reviews are the freshness signal. Everything above is static until reviews keep it alive.
7.1 Aim for steady, not spiky
There is a floor before any of this matters. Below roughly 25 reviews, engines rarely treat a profile as authoritative enough to cite at all. Between 25 and 100, you start appearing in niche queries. Past 100 with recent activity, you become competitive for the head queries in your category. Past 500 with a balanced spread, you are a preferred source for category-level answers.
Target 2 to 4 new verified reviews per month, per platform. Rotate who you ask: different industries, company sizes, roles, use cases. A profile with variety answers more kinds of questions.
Recency matters as much as volume. Reviews under 30 days old are the strongest freshness signal, and reviews under 90 days are the window engines mostly weight. Profiles that go 180 days without a new review see their citation share slide.
Coach the ask, gently. Reviews over 200 words that name specific features, the reviewer's role, company size, and a real outcome get cited far more often than "great product, five stars." Reviews that mention a switch ("we moved from X because...") become prime sources for comparison queries.
On ratings: a balanced 4.0 to 4.7 average beats a suspicious perfect 5.0. Profiles with a bimodal spread of many fives and many ones often get down-weighted or filtered. Verified badges carry more weight than unverified ones. Your one-star reviews with thoughtful replies are doing more for you than you think.
7.2 Reply to every review, in your own words
Vendor responses are public, crawlable text. Engines cite them when answering questions about support quality, roadmap, or a known limitation.
Set a 100% response rate within 14 days. Write each reply as if it were a short piece of content, because it is. Name the specific issue. Say what you did or will do. Skip the template.
How to tell it is done: no unanswered review on any platform, and your last five replies each say something a template could not.
Where people go wrong: running reviews as a campaign. A burst of 40 reviews in one week followed by silence performs worse than four a month for a year. G2's own analysis of its catalog found the median gap between a new review and an AI answer referencing that product is about eleven days, so the loop is quick. It only stays quick if you keep feeding it.
Common mistake: buying or incentivizing reviews. Platforms prohibit it, violations put your profile at risk of suspension, and there is no version of this where it is worth it. Use legitimate review programs and verified-customer outreach instead.
Step 8: Reinforce your profiles with schema on your own domain
Your review profiles and your own site should corroborate each other. Schema is how you make that machine-readable.
Add these on your product page:
- SoftwareApplication: name, description, applicationCategory, operatingSystem, offers with price and currency, aggregateRating
- Product: name, description, brand, sku, offers
- FAQPage: the same question and answer pairs you wrote in Step 6
- Organization: name, logo, url, and sameAs pointing at your review profiles
- BreadcrumbList: the navigation path to the product page
Then close the loop from the other direction. Set the "Website" field on each review profile to the schema-marked product page, so the link runs both ways.
Validate with the Google Rich Results Test and the Schema.org Validator, then watch the Enhancements section in Search Console for errors.
How to tell it is done: both validators pass clean, and your Organization sameAs array lists every profile you claimed in Step 2.
Where people go wrong: doing one side only. Schema without review profiles under-cites. Review profiles without schema under-cite. Together they resolve who you are, which is the whole point of establishing your brand as an entity engines recognize.
Step 9: Track, score, and refresh on a cadence
You have done the work. Now make it stick.
Re-run your prompt set monthly, exactly as you ran it in Step 1. Same prompts, same engines, same conditions. Comparability is the point.
Track five things:
- Share of voice by prompt category
- Citation rate, and how it compares to your closest competitors
- Profile completeness score on each platform
- Review recency, measured as days since your last review
- Review velocity, measured as reviews per month
The native dashboards give you a free head start. G2's Buyer Intent and AEO dashboard, Capterra Vendor Insights, GetApp Insights, the TrustRadius TR Score dashboard, and the Gartner Peer Insights vendor dashboard all come with your claimed profile.
They will tell you about your profile. They will not tell you what the engines said. For that you need the answer side, and that is where DeepSmith sits: per-prompt mention and citation rates with full answer history, the pages of yours that AI actually cites, and which competitor pages are winning the prompts you care about.
Then set a quarterly refresh. Update at least one feature, one integration, one price point, and one FAQ every quarter. Refresh screenshots so your UI does not look like it did two redesigns ago. Add a case study or comparison page.
How to tell it is done: the refresh is a recurring calendar event with an owner, not a good intention.
Where people go wrong: expecting movement in two weeks. Most teams see measurable change in 60 to 90 days, driven by review velocity, profile completeness, and schema all compounding together.
What to do next
If this feels like a lot, take a breath. It is a lot, and you do not have to do it in one week.
Do this instead. Run Step 1 today, even roughly, with ten prompts and thirty minutes. Then fix your G2 and Capterra structured fields this week, since that is the highest-return hour on the list. Then start the review ask in month one and let it run.
You do not need a new team to optimize review sites for AI. You need one owner, nine steps, and a cadence.
One step at a time. Momentum matters more than a perfect plan.
And when you are ready to stop checking these answers by hand, start a free DeepSmith trial and watch your prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode on a schedule, with the content side in the same platform.
