G2 has bought Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice from Gartner for roughly 110 million US dollars. The deal closed in February 2026. Four of the places buyers go to compare software now share one owner.
It is not an isolated move. TrustRadius, another major review platform, was acquired by HG Insights in June 2025. G2 went into this deal listing more than 180,000 products by its own count, valued at 1.1 billion dollars before the deal. If your team has shortlisted software lately, there is a good chance it leaned on a property that now answers to one of two owners.
Who pays for the page you are reading
Buyers pay nothing. Vendors pay. On Capterra, pay-per-click bids start at 2 dollars per click, and competitive categories run past 20 dollars per click, per Capterra's published terms. Vendr's purchasing data puts the median G2 contract near 27,000 dollars a year.
Review platforms have real costs, and vendors are the natural customer. So the economics of the comparison page are set by the side being evaluated. The platform earns more when vendors are more visible, not when buyers choose better. That is an incentive, not an accusation. Consolidation concentrates it. Where several companies once competed partly on credibility with buyers, one company now sets the terms for most of the category.
The shortcut was already unreliable
Gartner Digital Markets research from 2024 and 2025, drawing on 3,500 buyers, found that buyers start with about 4.4 vendors on average. 83 percent change that shortlist after doing their own research. The first list, the one most shaped by who appears where, rarely survives contact with real requirements.
Gartner found back in 2019 that 89 percent of buyers rated the information they met as high quality. The same research found it contradicted itself from one supplier to the next. The problem was never the volume of information. It was the ordering of it.
Downstream, the cost shows up as regret. Gartner's 2022 survey found that 56 percent of organizations reported high regret over their largest technology purchase of the past two years. High-regret deals took 7 to 10 months longer to close. Forrester's 2024 report found 81 percent of buyers dissatisfied with the vendor they chose. That tells you what borrowed criteria are worth. The good news: regret tracks how decisions get made, and the method is yours to change.
Buyers have already moved this way on instinct. Gartner's 2026 survey found 67 percent of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, up from 61 percent the year before. Researching alone is healthy. It also means the pages you research on carry more weight.
Three habits that survive consolidation
None of this needs new tooling. Only sequence.
- Treat review sites as one input, never the shortlist. They can tell you a product exists and what its users complain about. They cannot tell you whether it fits your environment, your data rules, or your budget cycle.
- Write your criteria down before you look. Forrester's 2024 report counts about 13 people in a typical software purchase and finds 89 percent of purchases span two or more departments. A weighted criteria document is the cheapest alignment tool a buying group will ever produce.
- Score against your standards, not against whoever appears first. A ranked page is an ordering of someone else's making. Your weighted criteria produce your own ordering, and the gap between the two is the influence of money you did not spend.
Discovery that starts with your criteria
Vendors pay to be seen. They can never pay to rank. Your list is ordered by fit, which is the whole point of it.
You set your scoring criteria privately. Qualified vendors apply without ever seeing them, so no pitch can be shaped to a rubric the vendor cannot read. Your whole team then sees every applicant ranked by fit, as a score per criterion, in numbers an evaluator can inspect and reweight. The right software comes to you, sorted by your standards rather than by anyone's spend.
PartnerAZ is vendor-funded too, so hold it to the standard any discovery channel should meet. It is free for buyers, and there is no unsolicited outreach, ever. It does not replace your RFP, RFI, RFQ, or procurement tools, and it takes no cut of any deal. It sits upstream, at the moment the shortlist forms, which is the territory that just changed hands.
What happens next is up to you. If you find a strong fit, engage the vendor directly. Many purchases below tender thresholds require no RFP at all. Keep the field on file for when the need matures. Or, if a formal procurement is required, use what you learned to write a sharper, better-scoped RFP.
The takeaway: the consolidation is not a crisis. It is a clarification.
Review platforms were always vendor-funded. There are simply fewer of them now, with one owner writing most of the rules. Keep reading them. Just stop letting them go first. Write your criteria, then look. See how a fit-first list works on the how it works page.