G2, Capterra, and the Authority Sites That Actually Feed AI Citations

G2 bought Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice from Gartner in February 2026, for roughly $110 million. If you’ve been submitting your product to all four separately, that’s over. One company now runs one shared review pool behind four storefronts.

That’s the easy news. Here’s the part that actually changes strategy.

Roughly half the people who click through to a review site like G2 today already heard about your product category from ChatGPT or Claude first. They’re not discovering you there. They’re verifying something an AI already told them. Which means the review site’s job quietly shifted, from “be found” to “confirm what was already said elsewhere,” and most companies are still building for the old job.

Here’s the harder number. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity. Not 11% overlap in a loose sense, 11% overlap, period. Optimize for one and you’ve covered a sliver of the other. That single stat is why “get listed on G2” stopped being sufficient advice, even though G2 itself is still worth doing.

Why third-party sites carry weight an AI system won’t give you directly

This is the part most advice skips past to get to the list, and it’s the part that actually explains the list.

Your homepage is not evidence. A review platform is. When an AI system synthesizes an answer to “what’s the best tool for X,” it’s making a judgment about which claims to trust. Your homepage saying “the leading solution for X” is a company describing itself, and every competitor’s homepage makes the identical claim in nearly identical language. The system has effectively no way to tell those apart, and it has learned, the same way an experienced buyer has learned, that a vendor’s own description of its own product carries close to zero evidentiary weight. A review platform is structurally different: it’s an aggregation of opinions from people who have no stake in your success, collected by an entity whose entire business model depends on that aggregation being seen as independent. That independence is the actual product these platforms sell, and it’s exactly the property an AI system can treat as a real signal instead of marketing copy.

Structured formats get extracted. Prose making the same claim doesn’t, as easily. A comparison-friendly page, a review platform with categories, star ratings, feature grids, pros-and-cons lists, presents information in a shape a language model can lift cleanly into an answer. “4.6 stars across 340 reviews, strongest in ease of use, weakest in reporting” is a set of discrete, citable facts. The equivalent claim buried in three paragraphs of blog prose is the same information wrapped in a shape that’s harder to extract cleanly and easier to summarize wrong. This is the same idea behind information gain optimization: a system rewards content it can verify and lift cleanly, not content that merely contains the right words somewhere in a paragraph.

Volume and independence beat a single polished case study. One glowing customer testimonial on your own site is a data point you selected and edited. Forty separate people, on Reddit, on a review platform, in a forum thread, independently saying something similar, without coordinating with each other or with you, is a pattern no vendor could fabricate at that scale without it becoming obvious. This is the exact mechanic that makes Reddit the single largest citation source across AI engines: it’s high-volume, largely uneditable by the brands being discussed, and genuinely independent in a way a curated testimonials page structurally cannot be. A page that only repeats what your own marketing already says elsewhere adds no new information to what the system has already seen from you. Independent third-party discussion, even when it’s saying something you’d have said yourself, counts as new information because it comes from a source the system hasn’t already discounted.

None of this replaces the directories below. It explains which ones are worth the effort and why, instead of treating all 47 as interchangeable checkboxes.

Two different jobs, not one

Directory authority and AI-citation authority get talked about like the same project. They aren’t.

Directory authority is the older job: procurement trust, review schema that shows stars in search results, backlink value, a G2 Grid badge a sales team can put on a slide. It still works. It still matters. It has nothing to do with whether an AI system decides to cite you when someone asks it a comparison question.

AI-citation authority runs on a different source mix, and the mix isn’t close to what a directory-listing checklist implies. Reddit alone captures somewhere between 40 and 47% of citation share depending on which engine you’re measuring. Wikipedia captures close to 48% of ChatGPT’s sources specifically. Between them, they outweigh every review directory combined, by a wide margin.

Add YouTube, LinkedIn, and Forbes, and the top 15 domains across all AI engines account for 68% of total citation share. Most SaaS marketing budgets are not allocated anywhere close to that ratio.

47 directories, grouped by what they’re actually good for

Not a flat list. These do different jobs for different audiences, and treating them as interchangeable is how companies end up with profiles on all of them and traction from none.

The consolidated majors

G2. The dominant B2B software review platform, 3.3 million-plus reviews, and its “G2 Grid” is the closest thing this space has to a standard comparison chart buyers actually reference. Since the February 2026 acquisition, it also owns Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice, sharing one review pool across all four front ends. Vendor pricing pages are opt-in, published, list-price based, and 20%-plus discounts are common on multi-year commitments.

Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice. Now G2-owned, but still worth listing on individually, because they pull different buyer segments as separate front-end brands even while drawing from the same underlying reviews. The submission effort that used to be four separate processes is now effectively one.

TrustRadius. Long-form, vetted reviews aimed specifically at enterprise procurement teams who want depth over volume. Pricing is custom quotes, not a public list price, generally cheaper than G2 but with meaningfully less reach and buyer-intent data. This is the platform to prioritize if your buyer is a committee doing due diligence, not a self-serve signup.

Trustpilot. A completely different value proposition from the majors above. Trustpilot is an official Google Seller Ratings partner, and its review widgets emit schema markup directly on your own site, which is the fastest practical path to getting star ratings show up next to your brand in Google search and ads. Four pricing tiers, roughly $299 to $1,099 a month.

Enterprise-gated

Gartner Peer Insights. Enterprise-only, with two real gates most companies don’t clear: you need to sell to mid-to-large enterprise, and your product needs to map to an existing Gartner Magic Quadrant or Market Guide category. If your product doesn’t fit an existing category, you don’t get in, full stop. Check this before spending time on it.

PeerSpot. Gated differently: at least 50 employees and 10 enterprise customers to qualify. In exchange, it’s the sole review provider inside Google Cloud Marketplace and a validated AWS Marketplace reviewer, which matters specifically if you sell infrastructure or cloud-adjacent products and nowhere near as much otherwise.

Agency and services marketplaces

Clutch. A global marketplace for business service providers, not pure software, listing more than 350,000 companies across 157 countries. Fits SaaS companies that also sell implementation, consulting, or managed services alongside the product, less useful for a pure self-serve tool with no services arm.

GoodFirms. Similar hybrid model to Clutch: over 60,000 listed software and service firms with roughly 795,000 monthly visitors. Worth pairing with Clutch rather than choosing one, since they draw overlapping but not identical buyer traffic.

DesignRush. Over 30,000 agency profiles, free listings, organized by service type and location. Strongest specifically for design and development agencies, publishing its own ranked “top agencies” lists by category and running agency awards that generate additional press pickup beyond the base listing.

Pay-per-lead directories

SoftwareSuggest. Runs a pay-per-lead model rather than a flat listing fee: you pay when the platform sends you a qualified lead, not simply for having a profile up. Different economics than G2 or Capterra, worth it specifically if your sales team can convert inbound leads efficiently.

SelectHub. Same pay-per-lead structure as SoftwareSuggest. The two are frequently run together rather than chosen between, since the cost only shows up when a lead actually arrives.

Open and broad-discovery software directories

SourceForge. Open discovery and comparison across more than 4,000 categories, and among the highest-traffic platforms on this list at roughly 3.8 million estimated monthly US visits, ahead of G2’s 2.5 million and Capterra’s 2.0 million by that measure. No enterprise gate, no employee minimum. One of the easiest platforms here to actually get listed on.

Crozdesk. Uses an AI-driven “Crozscore” methodology with LinkedIn-verified reviewer identity, which makes it harder to game than platforms that accept anonymous reviews. Smaller reach than G2 or Capterra, but the verification model is a real differentiator if review authenticity is your concern.

FinancesOnline. The honest caveat here matters: FinancesOnline carries a Domain Rating around 87, genuinely strong backlink authority, but under 9,000 monthly visits. List here for the backlink value specifically. Don’t expect meaningful buyer traffic from the listing itself.

ITQlick. Structurally different from every other platform on this list: there is no submission route. Listings are compiled by ITQlick’s own independent researchers, and the site runs no CPA or PPC advertiser program. You can’t buy or apply your way onto it, which also means a listing there, when it exists, reads as more independently sourced than a self-submitted profile.

Serchen. A cloud services marketplace specifically for SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS buyers, positioning itself around cloud and infrastructure categories more than general business software.

SaaSworthy. Scores tools on a data-driven blend of reviews, social signals, and web presence rather than review volume alone, and layers in buyer’s guides and comparison content on top of the base listings.

ToolFinder. A smaller, curated comparison site covering 1,400-plus productivity tools its own team says it has actually tested, rather than aggregating vendor-submitted claims. Narrower reach, but the “we tested this” framing is a distinct trust angle from the review-count model everything above runs on.

SaaSGenius. Smaller directory with free submission, oriented toward surfacing new and recently launched tools rather than competing on review depth with the established majors.

SaaSCompared. A narrower side-by-side comparison format rather than a full review-aggregation platform, useful specifically for head-to-head “X vs Y” pages rather than single-product profiles.

SoftwareWorld. Free listings organized by category, blending editorial reviews with user feedback rather than relying on user reviews alone, aimed at building third-party credibility for smaller or newer vendors that haven’t accumulated review volume elsewhere yet.

CrowdReviews. Ranks software and services purely on client review volume and sentiment, a more bare-bones alternative to the majors above with a much smaller footprint.

Launch and ongoing-discovery platforms

Product Hunt. The default SaaS launch-day platform: a single concentrated spike of traffic and signups on the day you launch, with limited ongoing discovery value once that day passes. Best treated as one input in a launch week, not a standalone authority-building channel.

SaaSHub. Organizes products by category and by “alternative to” relationships, which captures a different kind of buyer than a launch spike: someone who searches “alternatives to [a competitor you already compete with]” months or years after your launch. That’s a steady, high-intent flow rather than a one-day burst, and it’s one of the few platforms on this list built to stay useful long after launch day.

AlternativeTo. Same discovery mechanic as SaaSHub: community-driven software comparison built around “alternative to” search intent rather than launch timing.

BetaList. Runs in the opposite direction of every other platform here: it only features products that have not yet publicly launched. The free review queue takes four to six weeks; a paid expedite gets a listing reviewed in roughly a day, as of a June 2026 check. Useful before launch, irrelevant after.

BetaPage. Similar pre-launch positioning to BetaList: a directory for browsing and upvoting new and upcoming products before they’re generally available.

Betabound. A step further than either: it connects products actively recruiting beta testers with people who want to test pre-release software, making it hands-on participation rather than passive discovery.

Hacker News (Show HN). Not a formal directory, there’s no submission portal or listing fee, but the “Show HN” convention is a genuine, heavily-used launch venue with a technical, skeptical audience that reads and comments in the thread itself rather than leaving a star rating. Treat it as a launch-week venue with its own norms, not a listing you maintain.

Developer and technical tool discovery

StackShare. Built for engineers specifically: tool pages, head-to-head comparisons, and “Stack Decisions” where companies publicly explain why they picked one technology over another. This is the platform if your buyer is a developer evaluating infrastructure or tooling, and close to irrelevant if your buyer is a marketing or ops team.

LibHunt. Narrower still: tracks and ranks open-source projects and libraries by mentions on Hacker News and Reddit plus repository activity, covering 300,000-plus packages across 42 languages. Relevant specifically for open-source projects and developer libraries, not commercial SaaS products generally.

Startup and founder communities

Indie Hackers. A community of bootstrapped founders sharing what they’re building, often with real revenue numbers attached. Authority here comes from participating honestly in the community over time, not from a one-time listing.

F6S. Over 1 million registered startups, particularly strong in the European startup ecosystem, and doubles as a channel for accelerator applications and startup grants across 120-plus countries, not just a product directory.

StartupStash. A curated, free-submission directory of startup tools and resources organized by category, positioned more as a founder’s toolkit reference than a buyer-facing comparison site.

Deal and lifetime-marketplace platforms

AppSumo. The largest lifetime-deal marketplace by name recognition and catalog size, having paid out more than $113 million to software partners since launch. Revenue share to the platform runs around 60%, the highest on this list, but the audience size and existing buyer trust are the trade-off. 60-day refund window.

StackSocial. Broader catalog than AppSumo, mixing SaaS deals with hardware, online courses, and consumer tech, which means less category focus but a bigger overall audience. 30-day refund window, roughly 50% revenue share.

Dealify. Smaller and more curated, oriented toward growth-marketing and small-business tools specifically, with a 4.9-out-of-5 Trustpilot rating across 400-plus reviews and a revenue share in the 30 to 40% range.

DealFuel. Similar positioning to Dealify but with a specific, useful niche: dedicated WordPress and plugin categories, making it a better fit than the general marketplaces above if your product is a WordPress plugin or theme.

Editorial and curated “best of” sites

TechRadar Pro. Not a listing you submit a product to. It runs on pitched, bylined articles, roughly 800 words, with a business-technology focus, and companies are explicitly barred from naming themselves or their product in the article body, only in a footer bio. Getting covered here is a PR and contributor-relationship exercise, not a directory submission.

PCMag. Purely editorially curated “best of” software coverage. There’s no public vendor submission portal; inclusion happens through the editorial team’s own testing and PR outreach, not a form you fill out.

Digital Trends. Same editorial-only mechanic as PCMag: broad consumer and business tech coverage compiled by staff writers, reachable through PR pitching rather than self-submission.

Landscape maps and customer-reference platforms

chiefmartec’s Marketing Technology Landscape. An annual supergraphic mapping the entire martech category, now at 15,505 products as of the 2026 edition. Relevant only if your product is martech specifically, and inclusion runs through chiefmartec’s own annual submission window, not an evergreen listing process.

FeaturedCustomers. Over 34,500 vendor profiles across nearly 700 categories, with free listings. The differentiator is the ranking signal: customer success stories and case studies, not star ratings, which makes it a better fit if you have strong customer references but a thin review count elsewhere.

Spiceworks. An IT-professional community with its own software reviews section, narrower and more technical than G2’s general business-buyer audience. Worth it specifically for IT admin and infrastructure tools, less so for horizontal business software.

The sites that actually feed AI citations

This is the list nobody’s directory checklist includes, and it’s the one doing more work right now. None of the 47 above are on it, because AI engines aren’t pulling comparison answers from directory listings the way this whole list might imply.

Reddit. Captures the largest citation share of any single source, 40 to 47% depending on the engine measured. Perplexity leans on it hardest, at 46.7%, and rewards recency aggressively: a post or thread under 30 days old gets cited roughly 3.2 times more often than older content. What actually works here is real discussion happening because people are genuinely talking about your product, not seeded posts. Both Reddit’s own moderation and the AI systems reading it are getting better at discounting the latter.

Wikipedia. Close to 48% of ChatGPT’s citations specifically, and this is a ChatGPT-weighted signal, not a Perplexity or Google AI Overviews one. Most SaaS products will never clear the notability bar for a standalone article. A legitimate, properly sourced mention inside an existing comparison or category article still counts, and it’s a gap check worth running: search for your product category on Wikipedia and see if you’re missing from a list you should be on.

YouTube, LinkedIn, Forbes. Round out the top 15 domains that together capture 68% of all AI citation share across engines. None of these substitute for Reddit or Wikipedia individually, but each adds incremental coverage, and LinkedIn specifically carries B2B credibility signals the others don’t.

The 11% overlap, again, because it’s the number that should change your plan. ChatGPT and Perplexity are not the same target. A content and PR strategy built entirely around Wikipedia-style consensus material will do well in ChatGPT and close to nothing in Perplexity. A strategy built entirely around fresh Reddit engagement does the reverse. Most companies pick one without realizing they picked one.

Read the fuller mechanics of why fresh, specific, non-duplicated information wins citation over polished consensus copy in our piece on information gain optimization, and the broader framing in what generative engine optimization actually is.

Where to actually spend the effort

With 47 options and limited time, three things cover most of the practical ground: G2 (now effectively four listings in one), sustained real presence on Reddit in your actual category communities, and Trustpilot specifically for the review schema and star-rating benefit in search.

From the rest of the list, add SaaSHub and AlternativeTo for ongoing “alternative to” search capture, since that traffic compounds instead of spiking once. Add FinancesOnline only if backlink authority is the goal, not leads. If your buyer is a developer, StackShare earns real mindshare that G2 never will; if your buyer is IT specifically, the same is true of Spiceworks. If you sell a WordPress product, DealFuel’s dedicated category beats the general lifetime-deal marketplaces on relevance even if it beats them on nothing else.

Skip Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot until you actually meet their enterprise gates, since both reject applicants who don’t. Treat Product Hunt, BetaList, BetaPage, and Show HN as launch-week tactics rather than standing authority plays, since all four are built around a moment, not an ongoing presence. And don’t confuse the editorial sites, TechRadar Pro, PCMag, Digital Trends, with the rest of the list: there’s no form to fill out, that’s a PR relationship to build, on a different timeline than everything else here.

The mistake worth naming directly: treating a stack of directory listings as a finished “AI SEO authority” strategy. Directories solve a real, older problem, procurement-stage trust. They don’t solve AI citation, which runs on a Reddit-and-Wikipedia-weighted mix that most directory checklists never mention, because most of those checklists were written before that mix was the thing that mattered.

Getting llms.txt right doesn’t fix this gap either, for what it’s worth. The data on that specifically says no, and the reasons are the same shape as the reasons directory listings alone don’t cover AI citation: a technical checkbox getting marketed as a solution to a problem it wasn’t built to solve.

Related reading

• What Is Information Gain Optimization (IGO)?
• What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
• Does llms.txt Actually Get You Cited? The Data Says No