G2 badges explained: which ones you can earn, and what they cost
Two G2 badges come with a published number. Users Love Us at 20 reviews and a 4.0 average, and AI Users Trust at 25 responses. Everything else, the Leader badge included, is a ranking against your category. And since June 2025, most badges cost money to display even after you have earned them.
Somebody on your team has probably asked how many reviews you need for a G2 badge, and the honest answer depends entirely on which badge they mean. Only two come with a published number. Users Love Us is earned at 20 reviews with a 4.0 star average, and an AI Users Trust badge needs 25 responses to G2's AI trust questions.
Every other badge, the Leader badge included, comes from where your product ranks against everyone else in your category. So one of these belongs in a quarterly plan and the rest belong in a forecast. And since June 2025, most G2 badges cost money to display even after you have earned them.
Which badges exist, and how each one is earned
G2 badges come from several different report families, and the rules change between them.
| Badge | Where it comes from | How it is earned | Published number? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leader | Quarterly Grid Report | Placing in the Leader quadrant of your category Grid | No |
| High Performer | Quarterly Grid Report | Placing in the High Performer quadrant | No |
| Regional Leader, Regional High Performer | Regional Grid Reports | Same quadrants, scored within a region | No |
| Segment badges (Small Business, Mid-Market, Enterprise) | Segment Grid Reports | Same quadrants, scored within a company size band | No |
| Momentum Leader | Momentum Grid | An adjusted model weighted toward year on year growth in employee count, review volume, social following and web presence | No |
| Best Usability, Best Relationship, Best Results, Best Estimated ROI and the other index awards | Quarterly Index Reports | Ranking on specific review form questions, scored by a patent-pending algorithm | No |
| Users Love Us | Additional Rewards | 20 reviews at a 4.0+ star average | Yes |
| AI Users Trust, Gold, Silver or Bronze | AI trust scoring | 25 responses to the AI trust questions, plus the AI Verified tag, then a percentile placement | Yes, partly |
| Best Software Awards | Annual, published each February | Placement on an annual list | Disputed |
If anyone quotes you a specific review count for a Leader badge, they are guessing. G2 has never published one, and the threshold moves every season depending on who else collected reviews that quarter. The two badges with real published requirements are the ones almost nobody writes about.
None of this applies until your product is in a Grid Report, which takes 10 reviews in a single category. Those ten also fade, because G2 weights reviews on a decay curve that drops them to roughly 3% of their original value after three years.
Since Summer 2025, displaying a badge requires a paid plan
This change lives in a G2 announcement from April 2025 and never made it into the badge documentation, which is why so few people know about it.
"Vendors with upgraded G2 Profiles will have exclusive rights to publicly promote G2's quarterly Market Report badges and annual Best Software Award badges."
G2 badge accessibility changes, 29 April 2025
That applies from the Summer 2025 report release on 24 June 2025. A free profile still earns the Leader placement. The download button is what disappears.
Free profiles keep any badge earned before the Summer 2025 report, the Users Love Us badge, and full eligibility for quarterly Market Reports and annual awards. G2 also permits them to reference a placement in text with a backlink, giving "We are recognized as a Leader in a G2 Winter 2025 Report" as the example wording.
Free profile
- The Leader placement itself, earned on the same terms as anyone else.
- The Users Love Us badge, downloadable and displayable.
- Any badge earned before the Summer 2025 report on 24 June 2025.
- Full eligibility for quarterly Market Reports and annual awards.
- The placement referenced in text, with a backlink to G2.
Starter plan
- The badge graphic itself, for quarterly Market Reports and annual Best Software Awards.
Professional and Enterprise are quote-only.
That example is G2's own, and it is the most useful sentence in the announcement. Earn a Leader placement on a free profile and you may put that line on your homepage with a link to G2. The graphic stays locked.
Whether that is worth paying comes down to whether your buyers reach your website before or after your G2 profile. Most Series A teams have never looked, and the answer is sitting in their analytics.
The badge with an actual number on it
Users Love Us is the badge you can plan a campaign around, because G2 states the requirement plainly: it is "earned after collecting 20 reviews with an average rating of 4.0+ stars."
It also happens to be the only badge a free profile can newly earn and display. For a company not paying G2 and looking for something to put on a pricing page, this is the whole list.
One quirk before you build a page around it. G2's documentation says "you cannot select badges from the Additional Rewards panel, such as the Users Love Us badge, as your G2 Profile badge." It works on your own website, and your G2 profile will show something else.
Twenty reviews at a 4.0 average is an operations question more than a G2 one. It comes down to asking regularly instead of in one push, and pointing enough of that asking at G2 to clear the threshold. Revly's collection links set the destination per campaign, so you can aim a season's worth of requests at G2 while a badge is the goal, then rebalance across your other listings once the count is banked.
The AI Users Trust badges, which nobody has noticed yet
G2 added a badge family for AI trust, and it is currently the most gettable badge in the system, partly because so few vendors have registered that it exists.
The requirements, quoted from G2's scoring methodology: a product must "have the AI Verified tag" and "have received a minimum of 25 responses to the AI trust questions used in badge scoring." It has to be a software product whose primary category is a defined G2 category, and the high level category grouping needs at least six eligible products before any badges get awarded.
For any product with AI functionality, this is cheaper to chase than a Leader placement. The pool competing for it is small, and 25 answers to a defined question set is a target you can actually work toward. The AI Verified tag is the prerequisite, and it is the step most teams have skipped.
When badges are awarded, and the date that actually matters
G2 publishes Grid and Index Reports quarterly. Work backwards from the review deadline several weeks before each release, which is the last day a review is guaranteed to count toward that season.
| Season | Final release |
|---|---|
| Winter 2027 | 1 December 2026 |
| Spring 2027 | 16 March 2027 |
| Summer 2027 | 18 May 2027 |
| Fall 2027 | 24 August 2027 |
Best Software Awards run on a separate annual cycle, counting reviews from 1 January to 31 December of the preceding year, with the 2026 awards launching on 18 February 2026.
One inconsistency we could not resolve, and we would rather flag it than pick a side. G2's scoring documentation says Best Software Awards need "at least 10 reviews in the past year." G2's trust badges page says that to be eligible for the Software Sellers or Software Products Best Of lists "you must receive at least 50 approved and published reviews during any given evaluation period." Two G2 pages, two numbers. They may describe different award lists. If Best Software is a goal for you, ask your G2 rep in writing which one applies.
Check the deadline rather than assuming, because a review submitted three days late lands in the next season instead, and by then the campaign has usually stopped.
Before you put a badge on your website
G2's badge documentation carries a technical warning that will cost you your search result stars if you miss it.
G2 offers a feature that lets search engines display your G2 aggregate rating, including stars, score and review count. The documentation says "G2 does not recommend enabling this feature if you have existing Product Review schema markup on your website," and separately, "if you use G2's Star Rating Widget to display star ratings in search results, do not enable this feature for Badges."
Pick one method per page, then confirm it in Google's Rich Results Test.
Competing structured data on one page can leave you with no stars at all, which is a worse outcome than either option alone. Check what schema your site already has before switching G2's version on.
The badge itself is also a fairly small piece of what a G2 profile gives you. G2's badge and star rating assets show G2 reviews, and the display rights sit behind the paid plans above. Revly's review widgets pull from every platform you collect on, refresh themselves as new reviews land, and drop onto a page with one embed, so the quotes your buyers actually read can sit alongside the badge instead of competing with it for space.
What we would actually chase
If you are early and not paying G2, aim at Users Love Us and ignore the rest. It is the only badge you can both earn and display for free, the requirement is public and fixed, and 20 reviews at a 4.0 average is a quarter of steady asking.
If your product does anything with AI, get the AI Verified tag and go after an AI Users Trust badge next. The competition for it is thin right now in a way that will not last.
Chase a Leader badge once you are genuinely competitive in your category and you have decided the $2,999 is worth it. Until then the free-profile text-and-backlink route gets you most of the credibility at none of the cost, and almost nobody realises G2 allows it.
Capterra is the other question people ask at this point. G2 bought it in February 2026 and left the two rulebooks separate, so a Capterra campaign still runs on different incentive rules and different mechanics to a G2 one.
And if you are weighing G2 against everything else on the list, we wrote up the whole set: the app marketplaces, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights and TrustRadius, and which buyer each of them actually reaches.
