How many G2 reviews do you actually need?
Ten reviews in a category gets you into a Grid Report. Twenty at a 4.0 average earns Users Love Us. Both are lower than teams assume. The complications are in where those reviews sit, how they age, and one incentive rule that quietly works against you.
If you are trying to work out how many G2 reviews you need before anything useful happens, there are two numbers worth knowing. Ten reviews in a category gets your product into that category's Grid Report. Twenty reviews at a 4.0 star average earns the Users Love Us badge.
Both are lower than most teams assume, which is usually good news. The complications are in where those reviews sit, how they age, and one rule about incentives that can quietly work against you.
The thresholds
| What you want | What G2 requires |
|---|---|
| To appear on a live Grid on a category page | The category needs 3 products with 10 or more reviews |
| Your product in a Grid Report | 10 reviews in that category |
| The category to publish a Grid Report at all | 6 products with 10 or more reviews, and 150 reviews across the category |
| The Users Love Us badge | 20 reviews, 4.0 star average |
| A badge from a Grid Report | A place in the Leader or High Performer quadrant |
| The Overall Review Sentiment panel on your profile | 10 responses to the relevant question |
The first two rows are different things, and nearly every article we read while writing this treated them as one number. A live Grid shows up on a category page once three products have ten or more reviews. The quarterly Grid Report needs six products and 150 reviews across the category. In a smaller category you can be visible on the live Grid months before a Report ever runs, which is worth knowing if you have been told you are years away.
Reviews only count in the category they were left in
This is the most common reason a team with plenty of reviews still isn't on a Grid. Ten reviews spread across three categories gets you nothing. You need ten in one.
Most teams have never checked this. They know their total, they assume they are short, and they are actually two reviews away in their main category and nowhere near it in the other two.
So before you plan anything, go and count properly. Open your G2 seller account and look at how your existing reviews break down by category rather than in aggregate.
If you are also collecting on Capterra, the app stores, or anywhere else, that count gets harder to hold in your head, which is the reason Revly's dashboard exists. It shows where your review counts stand across every platform you are on, so "how many do we have in this category" stops being a question you answer by hand once a quarter.
The badge most teams are actually chasing
Users Love Us is usually the goal, and G2 states the requirement plainly: it is "earned after collecting 20 reviews with an average rating of 4.0+ stars."
Users Love Us
- The only badge you can download and share on a free profile.
Grid Report badge
- Requires a place in the Leader or High Performer quadrant.
- Scored against everyone else in your category.
- Recalculated every reporting season.
It is also the only badge you can download and share on a free G2 profile. Free profiles still qualify for recognition in Grid Reports and Best of Software awards, but sharing a newly earned badge takes a paid profile.
Grid Report badges work differently, and no review count earns you one. You need to place in the Leader or High Performer quadrant, which is scored against everyone else in your category and recalculated every reporting season. If somebody quotes you a fixed number of reviews for "Leader," they are guessing.
Incentivised reviews are worth less
This one is buried in the scoring methodology and it should change how you spend your budget. Among the factors G2 weighs:
"Reviews collected from current product users or from users who have more experience with the product are given increased weight. Reviews solicited without incentive are also weighted more heavily."
G2 research scoring methodologies
Incentivised reviews are allowed, up to G2's $100 cap, and they get labelled as incentivised when they publish. They just count for less than a review someone wrote without a gift card attached.
Which means the review you got by emailing a customer of three years is worth more than the one you paid for. Spend the incentive budget on the people who would not have replied to a plain email, and ask everyone else properly first.
Reviews do not expire, they fade
You will find confident claims that G2 reviews expire after 12 months, or 18, or two years. None of that is right, and believing it leads people to run exactly the wrong campaign.
G2 uses a decay curve that recalculates daily:
"A review decays gradually for the first 90 days and maintains a stronger weight for the first 18 months, after which the rate of decay accelerates. After about three years, the review reaches approximately 3% of its original weight and maintains that weight in perpetuity."
G2 research scoring methodologies
- 0 to 90 daysNear full weight, easing down
- 90 days to 18 monthsStill strong
- 18 months to 3 yearsDropping faster
- 3 years and beyondAbout 3%, held there permanently
Buried in that documentation is the most useful sentence on this page: decay resets when a reviewer updates their review. An old review that a customer refreshes goes back to full weight.
So the fastest way to improve your position might be going back to twenty happy customers from 2024 and asking them to update what they already wrote, rather than finding twenty new reviewers. It is a much easier ask, and we have never seen anyone recommend it.
The wider point is that a curve rather than a cutoff means timing beats volume. Forty reviews collected in one month all fade together and leave you with a cliff. Forty collected across a year keeps your position steady. Slow and regular wins, and that is G2's own maths saying so rather than us.
Keeping a steady trickle going is more of an operational problem than a strategy problem, which is what Revly's collection links are for. One link per campaign, sent to the right platform for each customer, so asking becomes something you do continuously instead of a project you rediscover every nine months.
Some reviews will not move your score
Check this before you count your total and assume you have cleared ten.
Business partner reviews, from resellers and similar, are allowed and get labelled as such, but G2 says they "do not impact the star rating, G2 Score, Satisfaction or Market Presence scores, Best Software lists, or other G2 ranking algorithms." They are visible on your profile. They just do not count toward anything.
Once you have the reviews, use them
Hitting ten or twenty is the start rather than the finish, and the reviews you already have are usually underworked.
Reply to them. Response rates across this category are poor, and a review with a considered reply underneath reads very differently to a prospect than one sitting in silence since last spring. Revly drafts a reply in your brand voice for every review waiting on one, then takes you to the platform to post it. See managing responses.
And put them somewhere people will actually see them. Your best reviews are sitting on a platform most of your website visitors will never open. Revly turns them into widgets for your own pages that update themselves as new reviews come in.
Where we would start
Count by category, not in total. Most teams are closer than they think in one category and further than they think in the others.
Check whether your category is active enough to publish a Grid Report at all. If it isn't, aim at the live Grid and the Users Love Us badge instead, since both are reachable without waiting on five other companies to collect reviews.
Ask without an incentive first, because those reviews score higher, and ask people who have used the product a while for the same reason. Go back to long-term customers and ask them to update reviews they left two years ago. Then spread the whole thing over months instead of running one push, because the curve punishes bursts.
