Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio
The buying journey (and what is actually purchased) for enterprise software is undeniably changing. What does that mean for software review companies like G2? Tim Sanders, G2’s Chief Innovation Officer, leads research at online review platform provider G2, studying market trends and the economics of AI, particularly AI agents. Part of Sanders’ work involves thinking about how G2 can be more innovative and keep up with the move from business SaaS (software as a service) to business agents. Another part is tracking how gen AI is disrupting the B2B software buying journey. Both are becoming increasingly important for businesses to understand.
Are LLMs taking away traffic from review sites like G2?
Half of buyers said they now start the buying journey in an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity , instead of Google Search.
Last year, G2 discovered that the Best Software Awards report and related content comprises around 60% of G2 citations on Large Language Models (LLMs). Sanders argues it’s a powerful signal that LLMs are looking for sentiment at scale so they can confidently provide recommendations. Needless to say, the report has become very important to G2’s AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) strategy.
So, when you ask Sanders if LLMs are taking traffic away from G2 and other review sites, his response is, “Yes and no.” Traffic did decrease in 2023/24 for the company, like it did for many other companies (not only review sites), but then, in 2025, they saw traffic increase, with over 1 million human visitors coming from AI chatbots in the process of buying.
G2 studies conducted in 2025 show that B2B buyers are spending half their buying journey on a chat, like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. So, yes, answer engines are disrupting traffic - at least initially. So, yes, answer engines are disrupting traffic - at least initially.
However, another study found that review platforms compete for about 30% of citations; the other 70% go to vendors. So the real fight is between user generated content platforms (UGC), like Reddit, and publishers and review platforms, like G2 and TrustRadius.
LLMs can give answers fast, but for most B2B buyers, it’s not the final stop. Buying software is often a high-risk proposition, so B2B buyers “trust but verify.” This explains why citations from answer engines are so important. Sanders cited a Prompt Watch report that found that citations from answer engines have a high click through rate, sometimes as much as 10x higher.
What this means is that, yes, people use answer engines to kick-start the buying journey, but G2 is getting cited a lot, which is driving buyers to the firm's site. The closer a human gets to making a decision, the more dominant G2 becomes, says Sanders:
G2 is focused first and foremost on influencing the answer. We educate the software marketers that it's not about citations, but about winning the answer. So if half the users start on ChatGPT and they're using it to build their shortlist, more than any other source, and many make their decision based on their shortlist, it doesn't really vary, then G2’s influence in that large language moment is as important as coming to G2, if not more. Because we've always been in the business not only of helping buyers make better buying decisions, but we've also been in the business of influencing seller outcomes.”
If answer engines are becoming the first stop for buyers, the obvious question is how is G2 adapting its model to remain an authoritative source for those answers? How G2 is optimizing for AI citations and answer engines? The firm is facing a new way of influencing the buyer journey and the company is doing some things to improve the gross volume of citations they get from LLMs and from organic Google search. Some of these things include more freshness updates, and adding new types of content, including what Sanders called “frontier content,” content that answers questions that haven’t been answered before. This work, he says, has helped reverse G2’s traffic slowdown significantly.
G2 is also evolving the standard review model, leaning in to double verification to ensure the reviews are from real people who do use the software they review. The company also acquired Unsurvey in 2025 to leverage AI and voice to make the review process easier for people. Unsurvey uses AI to interview people, making it easier for them to respond and provide more information. Unsurvey had also been working on voice interaction, so now you can leave a review on G2 using voice. Sanders explains that the more specific people are in the review process, the better the signal to humans and the better opportunity for pattern matching the language models.
He adds that G2 saw a huge jump in the number of reviews and the amount of information in each review after introducing voice capabilities.
Another new review capability is the ability to add custom questions for categories like AI Agents that measure technical indicators such as hallucination rate and accuracy of actions, he explains:
We know that with the rise of AI, technical buyers are stepping in, becoming economic buyers, and they ask different questions. They're not as concerned about Net Promoter Score as they are with errors and efficiency of the actual product. So we've been moving more and more to start capturing more technical signals in our review process to differentiate
From SaaS to agentic platforms: shifting how software is bought
The best global software companies in the report (i.e., HubSpot, Salesforce, Google) all have one thing in common - they have embraced AI agents as a huge part of their Go-To-Market (GTM), evolving from SaaS to agentic platforms. There is a difference between the two, Sanders explains, with agentic having up to 10x the opportunity of improving an enterprise’s results compared to SaaS.
AI's great leap from machine learning classification to generative AI and now agentic has reset the playing field in a way that is toppling most of the mid-tier incumbents. Now the top-tier incumbents are very invested, and they've moved faster than history would have said they should have moved. If Clayton Christensen were alive, I think he would be pleasantly surprised at the agility of Microsoft, Salesforce, and even HubSpot, given their dominance over the last few years.
What does the shift from SaaS to agentic mean really? Sanders frames the shift to agentic platforms not just as a technology change, but as a different economic model for software. He compares buying agentic platforms as buying wholesale, “buy one, make many,” where the platform becomes an intermediary between the buyer and the seller. On the other hand, buying SaaS is more like buying retail. He said the growth of SaaS economically from an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) perspective is predicated on the retail model and companies will have to buy a lot of little SaaS solutions, resulting in a lot of different subscriptions.
But the wholesale model is a different story and it’s disrupting the retail model. Scott Galloway has talked a lot about the wholesale model, saying the problem with wholesale platforms is they will grow to become big, ugly, low multiple businesses, similar to airlines (see here and here for examples of his perspective). Sanders says:
I think that the sexy AI wholesaler of today may be a very low-margin, low-multiple company tomorrow. This is why, as a person who covers the market, I've seen OpenAI make a bold decision to pursue ads and shopping commissions, to have more of a Meta meets Amazon multiple than accidentally pursuing a low margin business like API tokens for developers, and create an airline 20 years from now. So it's a fascinating dynamic. SaaS isn't dead. It's not even close to it. However, I would say that SaaS that lacks agentic capabilities in their roadmap will have to go down market to small business and to heavily industrial verticals to survive. I do know that.
Will companies shift from SaaS apps to AI agents?
A couple of other interesting facts is that almost half of the 2026 top 100 best software and 86 of the 100 fastest growing software products weren’t on the list last year. So, there’s a lot of new software hitting the market that companies are looking for.
The question is will companies continue to keep buying smaller AI applications/agents or will they shift to agentic platforms? Sander said G2 did a study of B2B software owners centered on AI agents and they found that ready-made agents were delivering more cost-savings than agent builder platforms or in-house agent building.
Sander’s theory is that many agent builder platforms have been around a long time and carry a lot of UI legacy debt. This debt has made it hard for them to pivot from their existing user experience. But AI startups don’t have that problem. They can quickly adapt to what users need in the moment and for this reason small vertical agents will, in the short term, win out from a customer satisfaction point of view.
However, he also believes that five years from now, mid-sized companies with technical leaders will start to think more wholesale than retail and look for general purpose tools to write a majority of the solutions they need, instead of buying individual software applications. Again, this is more long-term; the short term reality is not the same, despite what Wall Street keeps saying with its 'SaaSpocalypse' paranoia.
There’s also the trust factor to overcome. Companies need to fully trust agents before they get rid of the software they have grown to know and trust (even if they hate it), and that isn’t going to happen overnight. Plus, agentic platforms require people to have that builder mindset and even those who are frustrated with their current solutions may not have the time, knowledge, or desire to build something on their own (especially if security is a top concern).
My take
The question of whether review platforms are still needed in the answer-engine era isn’t the right question. The right question is how is the B2B software buyer journey changing as a result of AI and how does any company - vendor, review platform, or other, remain relevant?
LLMs need trusted sources to cite in buyer searches. Without those trusted sources, buyers would have no confidence in the answers they get and stop using LLMs.
G2 is evolving to ensure it continues to be one of those trusted sources. And the changes it is making are smart, including the AI interviews, voice review option and the custom questions for AI agents.
Sanders perspectives on SaaS versus agentic also make a lot of sense. Enterprise software is attempting to shift to agentic platforms. You just have to read LinkedIn to see the shift happening (or my inbox). But despite what many vendors (or Wall Street) might say, it’s not going to happen overnight and for a while we are going to see both SaaS and agentic in a single platform until we get to the point that agentic is trusted enough and works well enough to take over.
Sidenote: Sanders also shared his perspectives on trusting AI and human-in-the-loop which I am saving for another day as worthy of deeper discussions.