There's a fairy tale we've been telling ourselves about the future of software buying. AI will magically know what you need. Agents will do your homework. The pain of endless research will vanish into a prompt. The interface will be slick. The experience will feel like sorcery.
Bullshit.
What's really happening is a data war. And it's about who controls the raw material that decides what you buy before you even know you're being sold to.
That's why G2's acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp from Gartner isn't just another tech deal. It's a hostile takeover of your next buying decision.
The Moment Before the Moment
On paper: four major B2B review platforms merge into a network touching 200 million buyers and six million reviews. Sounds boring. Sounds like consolidation theater.
In reality: it's a land grab for the most valuable real estate in B2B, the split second before you know what you want.
Map any B2B buying journey and you'll find the same pattern: most of the money, most of the tools, most of the performative bullshit happens downstream, after you've already decided which vendors to consider. But the kill shot happens way earlier, in the shadows. When someone asks: "What am I even supposed to be looking at?"
That question is the gateway drug. It determines who gets in the room, who never gets a shot, and which data streams start pinging inside every sales and marketing surveillance system in your stack.
Google used to own that moment. You'd type "best CRM for mid-market SaaS" and watch the ecosystem of SEO grifters and content farms fight for your eyeballs. But that model is dying, strangled not just by competition, but by systems like ChatGPT and Gemini that don't send you to ten blue links. They just give you the answer.
When the interface shifts from "here are your options" to "here's what you should do," the power moves upstream. To whoever owns the data feeding those answers.
And that's where G2's play stops looking like a merger and starts looking like a siege.
Reviews Aren't Content Anymore. They're Weapons.
We've been trained to think of user reviews as media. Something to read, compare, maybe trust if you're feeling generous. But at this scale, they're not media. They're infrastructure.
Six million verified reviews across four global platforms don't describe software. They map reality. They encode who's evaluating what, in which industries, at what company sizes, and often at what exact moment in a budget cycle. That's not social proof. That's surveillance.
By absorbing Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp, G2 isn't expanding its audience. It's weaponizing its intent graph. Every comparison page, every category scroll, every time you shortlist a vendor—that's another signal in a system built to turn your curiosity into someone else's commission.
This is why G2 brags about "3x more buyer intent" and pay-per-lead models. The acquisition isn't about helping you make better choices. It's about building a marketplace where your intent is the product being sold.
Fortifying the Moat While Rome Burns
There's a quiet panic spreading through the B2B media world: what happens when AI stops sending traffic and starts giving answers?
If a language model can spit out "the best project management tools for distributed teams" without ever mentioning your site, you don't just lose a click. You lose your reason to exist.
G2's answer: make yourself too big to ignore.
By becoming the largest, most "trusted," most comprehensive archive of B2B software opinions, it's positioning itself not as a destination for humans, but as a data source for machines. If AI agents need a ground truth for what software exists and how it's perceived, G2 wants to be the oracle they can't avoid.
This isn't defense. It's a preemptive strike. G2 is pivoting from being a publisher in the search economy to being a data cartel in the AI economy.
The Opening Salvo
Pull back, and this looks less like a deal and more like the first shot in a bigger war for B2B intent.
Software companies are bleeding right now. AI promised growth, efficiency, precision. Instead, it made demand generation noisier, more expensive, and less predictable. The promise of "more leads" is dead. The promise of "better signals" is everything.
That creates a market for platforms that don't just generate attention—they verify readiness. Not who clicked, but who's actually got budget and pain.
G2's bet: the future of B2B runs through fewer, deeper, more authoritative pools of intent data. Not dozens of fragmented noise machines. If that's right, review platforms stop looking like media companies and start looking like commodity exchanges, where demand itself is the thing being traded.
And once you see it that way, the next moves become obvious. More consolidation. More vertical control. More pressure to own not just research, but the entire arc from curiosity to contract signature.
The Shift No One's Talking About
What makes this moment fascinating isn't scale. It's timing.
Right when AI threatens to collapse the web into a single chat interface, G2 is digging deeper into the layer underneath. Turning reviews into signals. Signals into infrastructure. Infrastructure into a fortress.
For buyers, that might mean less noise. For vendors, it means more precise, more expensive, and more coercive access to in-market demand. For everyone else, it's the beginning of a new era where the most valuable B2B companies aren't the ones shouting the loudest, but the ones who see you coming first.
The acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp looks like a media story.
It's actually a hostage situation.
And in an AI-driven economy, those are the stories that end up owning everything.
