Review sources

How to add G2 reviews to your website (not just the badge)

5 September 2026 · JustReview

Adding G2 reviews to your website means importing the text from your public G2 product page and rendering it on your own domain. It does not mean pasting the badge G2 hands you, and the difference is worth two minutes before you build anything. We fetched our own G2 badge on 5 September 2026 and it is a 78,789-byte PNG containing no rating, no review count and not one word written by a customer. It is a picture whose only job is to move the reader to G2.

Everything below is measured rather than argued. The numbers come from our production database and from live requests made on 5 September 2026, and where the picture is unflattering to us we have left it that way.

What the G2 badge actually is

G2 publishes badge images at a predictable address, one per product. We requested ours four ways and recorded exactly what came back:

Three things fall out of that table. The first is that the theme parameter does nothing: all three variants returned the same file, and the server names it in the response as blue-10.png whichever theme you ask for. It is a fixed asset, not a rendering of your account.

The second is what is inside the file. Five filled stars, the phrase “Read our reviews on”, and the G2 logo. The stars are part of the artwork rather than a reading of your score, which is easy to prove: our own imported G2 reviews average 4.83, and the image would look the same if they averaged 3.0. Nothing in the picture is text, so nothing in it is available to a search engine, to an assistant answering a buying question, or to a visitor using a screen reader.

The third is a detail most people never look at. The badge is served with cache-control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate. That is an explicit instruction not to cache it. Every visitor to every page carrying that badge re-requests 78,789 bytes from G2’s servers, and G2 learns about every one of those visits. For comparison, our entire widget, the script and the stylesheet together, is 143,871 bytes over the wire compressed, measured the same day, and it is cached normally. One static picture that says nothing costs you over half of what a working review widget costs, on every single page view.

The profile page will not do the work either

The obvious alternative to a badge is a link: send people to the G2 profile and let the reviews speak there. That fails for a reason the table above already shows. When we requested our own G2 product review page with an ordinary desktop browser user agent, the response was HTTP 403, with x-datadome: protected in the headers. G2 runs bot protection in front of its review pages, which is entirely their right, and the practical consequence for you is that the content sitting behind that wall is not doing anything for your own domain. Reviews that live only on someone else’s site build someone else’s page, and this particular someone else has a paid product placement business on the other side of it.

That is also why the schema question has a boring answer. You cannot mark up ratings you do not display, and marking up ratings you did not collect is how sites earn manual penalties. We wrote up what Google actually allows in review schema markup and stars in Google, and the short version is that the text has to be on your page for any of it to be legitimate.

A G2 review is long, and it is never empty

Here is why G2 is worth the effort at all. Sources differ enormously in how much a single review gives you, and G2 sits near the top of everything we hold:

Around 470 characters is two or three real sentences, usually a situation, what the software did about it, and a reservation. That is a testimonial you can put next to a price. One hundred and thirty-four characters is a line, and a card designed for a paragraph looks broken when it holds a line.

The second half of that point is sharper. Across the 387,936 Google reviews in our database, 32.2% contain no text at all: a star rating and nothing else. On Capterra the figure is 0.8%. On G2, all fifteen reviews we hold carry written text, and the shortest of them is 215 characters. If you are a software vendor building a testimonial section, one G2 review does the work of several Google ones, which matters when you look at how few of either most vendors have. We measured that imbalance in detail when we wrote about adding Capterra reviews to a website: five of the seven Capterra accounts in our database hold zero Google reviews, because software companies rarely have a location anyone walks into.

G2 rates in half stars, and almost nothing else does

This is the trap that produces support tickets. G2 scores products on a scale that lands on half stars, and most review widgets are built to draw five whole ones. We checked every source in our database for ratings ending in .5, and there are only four:

Every other source we import, Google and Facebook included, produces whole numbers only: zero half stars across 387,936 and 49,144 reviews respectively. So a widget can get away with whole stars for years and then quietly misrepresent the first B2B source you connect. Our own fifteen G2 reviews break down as twelve at 5.0, two at 4.5 and one at 3.5, for an average of 4.83. A renderer that rounds each review to the nearest whole star turns those two 4.5s into fives and reports a better product than the customers described. Rounding is always flattering and always wrong, and under the advertising rules we summarised in our notes on the FTC rules for displaying customer reviews it is not a defensible way to present someone else’s words.

How to get the text onto your page

The mechanics are deliberately short. You give us the public URL of your G2 product page, the one in the form www.g2.com/products/your-product/reviews. We import the reviews that sit on it. You paste a three-line snippet where you want them to appear, on any platform that lets you place HTML, and the reviews render as text in your own markup. There is no API key to request, no partner application, no minimum review count, and no change to your CSS unless you want one. The full setup walkthrough lives on the G2 reviews page, and you can start a free account before deciding anything.

What you get in return for that effort, and this is the whole argument, is that the words end up in your HTML. They are indexable, they are quotable by an assistant answering “is this software any good”, and they are still there when a visitor has JavaScript disabled or a screen reader turned on. The badge gives you none of that in exchange for 78,789 bytes on every page view.

Two caveats, because they are real. G2 sits on our Ultimate plan, alongside Capterra, Tripadvisor and the other sources that require a crawl rather than an official API, so it is not part of the free tier; the current tiers set out what that costs. And G2 is genuinely a small source for us. We hold fifteen G2 reviews across exactly one connector, and that connector is our own profile. We would rather tell you that than imply a volume we do not have, which is the same principle we applied when we ranked every source we import by whether it still produces anything in which review sources still work in 2026.

What to do about it

If you sell software and your reviews are on G2, the practical order is: connect G2 for the paragraphs, connect one faster source for recency, and pool them in a single widget so the section never looks abandoned. If you only take one thing from the measurements above, make it this one: the badge is a picture. Everything that makes a review persuasive, the specifics, the reservation, the name of the problem it solved, is text, and text only helps you when it is on your page.