G2 Newsroom

How G2 Is Bringing Accountability to AI Software Claims in 2026

Written by Emily Malis Greathouse | Aug 27, 2026, 5:00:00 PM

G2’s software marketplace features over 2,000 categories and more than 200,000 products and services. And it is rapidly expanding as AI drives new products, companies, and categories into the market.

The numbers tell the story — and they're accelerating. As of July 2026:

  • AI categories have grown 152% year-over-year (YoY), with 111 total AI categories
  • 30,274 products now listed across those 111 AI categories — up 10% month-over-month (MoM) and 630% YoYr
  • 265,194 reviews of AI products on G2 — up 61% YoY
  • 4,400 AI products have at least one review (+97% YoY), and 1,498 have 10+ reviews (+50% YoY)
  • G2 has added 10,259 new AI products in its current fiscal year, with 2,856 new products added in July alone

Why this matters to you: Whether you're a buyer evaluating tools or a vendor building with AI, G2 is where the AI software market is being benchmarked in real time. More products, more reviews, and more categories mean sharper signals and better decisions.

What new AI categories has G2 added in 2026?

G2's Market Research team has been tracking emerging AI use cases as they graduate from trends into real buyer demand.

G2 has added 27 new AI categories since February 2026. Here's a partial snapshot:

Why this matters to you: New categories aren't just organizational housekeeping. They signal where real buying activity and market growth is happening. If your team is evaluating AI for a specific workflow (finance, legal, sales, DevOps), G2 increasingly has a dedicated space with real user reviews to guide that decision.

What do "AI Enabled" and "AI Verified" mean on G2 — and what's the difference?

"AI-powered" has become one of the most overloaded phrases in software marketing. When every product claims to include AI, buyers lose the ability to filter meaningfully, and vendors with real, substantive AI investment get flattened into the same category as tools with a glorified autocomplete.

With millions of verified reviews on G2, we’ve introduced two new AI designations to validate marketing claims with reviewer facts. These designations appear on product profiles and category listings across G2.com:

AI Enabled

  • Indicates a product incorporates AI technology — specifically machine learning (ML), large language models (LLM), generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, or neural network-based predictive analytics — to enhance its core functionality
  • Explicitly excludes basic if/then logic, rules-based automation, and standard search indexing
  • Can be self-declared by vendors in my.G2 under Product Information; G2's Market Research team may also assign or adjust based on available evidence
  • 21,000+ products already carry this designation at launch
    • Note: AI Enabled ≠ AI Native. An AI Enabled product uses AI to enhance existing functionality. An AI Native product is built with AI as its core architecture — it wouldn't function meaningfully without it.

AI Verified

  • A community-validated signal: Products earn an AI Verified designation when 10 or more reviewers confirm they've directly used the product's AI features. We gauge this based on responses to the review question: "Have you used artificial intelligence (AI) features as part of this product?"
  • Cannot be self-reported or purchased — it's only earned through peer validation
  • 1,200+ products already qualify at launch

Why this matters to buyers: You can now filter for AI with clarity and intent. Whether you've already decided you need AI-enabled tooling or you're still evaluating whether AI is relevant to your use case, these designations let you search and compare products without needing a translator to understand the level of AI they offer.

Why this matters to software brands: Real AI investment deserves real differentiation. AI Enabled badges give you a structured way to surface your capabilities. AI Verified turns reviewer activity into a credibility signal that no competitor can replicate by writing better marketing copy.

Do G2's AI designations matter for AI search and buyer discovery?

The implications of G2’s new AI designations extend beyond search and category pages:

  • For AI assistants and LLMs: Structured, validated AI signals give G2 product pages richer data to surface when buyers ask an AI assistant to recommend tools.
  • For the broader software market: As AI claims proliferate, buyers increasingly can't distinguish real AI investment from marketing fluff. G2's designations — backed by reviewer validation — give the market a shared vocabulary for what "AI" actually means in practice.
  • What we're watching: In addition to gathering more trust signals, G2 has launched its AI Users Trust badge program in beta this month for the HR market. A scored designation that sits above the AI Enabled and AI Verified tags in G2's AI credentialing system, the AI Users Trust badges are designed to measure the degree to which users trust AI capabilities embedded in products listed in G2’s HR taxonomy. As AI has spread across every corner of HR software, buyers have shifted from asking what a platform can automate to asking what they can trust it to decide. In a function where decisions touch people's pay, careers, and legal protections, transparency has become the real product.

The questions G2 added to the review form in early June 2026 for AI Users Trust, includes:

  • How accurate are the AI-generated outputs in this product?
  • How consistent is the AI's performance across repeated use?
  • When the AI makes a mistake, how easy is it to catch and correct?
  • How confident are you that your data is handled responsibly by this product's AI?
  • Does this product give you clear controls over what data the AI can access?
  • How well does this product explain why the AI produced a specific result?
  • Is it clear when you are interacting with AI vs. rules-based logic or a human?
  • Overall, how much do you trust the AI capabilities in this product?
  • How easy is it to override or turn off AI features when needed? (Admin only - unscored)
  • Describe a specific moment where the AI helped — or failed — you. What happened? (Unscored)

These questions are surfaced to reviewers that respond ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you used artificial intelligence (AI) features as part of this product?’

The AI software market is expanding faster than any category G2 has tracked. But scale without signal is just noise. These new designations - and the taxonomy work behind them - exist so that when a buyer searches for AI, what they find is real.