The software industry is increasingly questioning the growing influence of G2 following its agreement to acquire Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp from Gartner. The deal, announced in late January and expected to close in Q1 2026, consolidates several of the most influential B2B software discovery platforms under a single owner .
How big is G2’s footprint after the acquisition?
According to G2’s own disclosures, the combined group will host around 6 million verified software reviews and reach more than 200 million software buyers annually across thousands of categories.
Individually, the platforms already commanded significant scale:
- G2 reports over 3 million verified reviews on its platform
- Capterra publicly states it hosts more than 2.5 million reviews across business software categories
- Software Advice and GetApp, both part of Gartner Digital Markets, contribute additional large review inventories, though Gartner does not break out exact figures per site
In terms of influence, independent industry analysis provides a clearer proxy than raw traffic or revenue. A study by SE Ranking measuring review-platform citation share in AI answers and search results found:
- G2 accounted for ~23.1% of review-platform citations
- Capterra for ~17.8%
- Software Advice for ~12.8%
(GetApp was included within the same Gartner Digital Markets cluster and not listed separately)
Taken together, these figures imply that platforms now owned by G2 represent approximately 53–54% of global software-review visibility in this dataset. Analysts estimate that including GetApp’s additional reach lifts that figure to roughly 55–58% of review and discovery influence, depending on methodology.
Is that a monopoly?
In strict legal terms, no. Competition authorities in the EU and US typically associate monopolies with market shares well above 70%. However, a share above 40–50% can qualify as a “dominant position”, particularly in markets with strong network effects, a category that software discovery increasingly fits.
Review platforms act as gatekeepers in the buying journey. For many businesses, especially SMBs and mid-market buyers, these sites are the first and sometimes only stop before engaging vendors. As generative AI tools increasingly surface software recommendations based on existing review databases, control over those datasets becomes even more consequential.
Why the industry is uneasy
Vendors and analysts point to several risks:
- Pricing power: fewer alternative platforms may reduce vendors’ ability to diversify demand generation
- Ranking influence: consolidated control over taxonomies, badges, and visibility logic could shape outcomes across categories
- AI amplification: as AI search tools rely on dominant review sources, concentration at the data level may translate into disproportionate downstream influence
The bottom line
G2 is not a monopoly in the legal sense. But by combining G2, Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp, the company has moved into clear gatekeeper territory, with control over more than half of global software-review influence by several independent measures. That level of concentration explains why the software industry, and potentially regulators are beginning to ask whether G2’s growing power has gone too far.
