Can I see who wrote a G2 review?

Often, but not always. G2 lets reviewers post without their name, photo or company, in which case only their job category and industry are shown. Validated reviewers with names give you a person and usually a company to work from.

Which G2 reviewers make the best leads?

Mid-rating reviewers (two to four stars) at companies your size, whose cons describe something you do well. One-star reviewers have often already left; five-star reviewers are happy.

Is it ethical to contact a competitor's reviewers?

Writing to someone about a problem they described publicly is reasonable if you are relevant, honest and brief. Do not misrepresent how you found them, and do not attack the competitor.

How recent should a G2 review be?

Recent enough that they still use the product and still feel the problem: roughly the last year. Older complaints may have been fixed, or the person may have moved on.

Turning G2 reviewers into leads

A list of your competitor's unhappy customers, written by them

Most lead sources make you guess whether someone has the problem. A G2 review removes the guess. The reviewer has told you which product they use, how long they have used it, what they like and, in the "dislikes" section, what they wish were different. On G2 that often comes with a job title and company size. It is the closest thing to a customer interview you can read without booking a call.

The method is narrow: you are looking for people stuck with a competitor who would be better off with you. Not people browsing your category, not happy customers, and not people who left years ago.

Who is on G2

G2 is a software review site, so its reviewers are software users: operations staff, marketers, sales managers, developers, finance teams, IT administrators, and founders of small companies. Reviews skew to business software, from small tools to enterprise platforms.

Who you will not find: buyers of physical products, local services or consumer apps (see the App Store and Trustpilot pages for those), and anyone who chose to review anonymously, who leaves only a job category and industry.

Reading a review for a buying signal

Not every unhappy reviewer is a lead. A quick scoring rule:

Review pattern	Lead quality	Why
Three stars, likes the core product, cons name a specific gap you fill	High	Committed enough to stay, frustrated enough to listen
Two stars, cons about price rises or support	High if you are cheaper or more responsive	Price and support complaints are about the vendor, not the category
Four stars with one sharp con	Medium	Mostly happy; the con must be painful to matter
One star, "we cancelled"	Low	Already gone, often already switched
Five stars	Very low	Leave them alone
Cons that describe the whole category ("all CRMs are clunky")	Low	You probably have the same issue

Phrases worth searching for in the cons: "wish it", "missing", "had to build a workaround", "steep price increase", "support takes days", "renewal", "we are evaluating", "reporting is limited".

How to do it by hand

List your three to five closest competitors and open their G2 review pages.
Filter by star rating (two to four stars) and sort by most recent.
Filter by company size if your product suits a particular band. G2 records the reviewer's company size on validated reviews.
Read the dislikes section first. Keep only reviews whose complaint you genuinely solve.
Record the reviewer's name, title, company size, industry and review date. If the company is named, note it.
Find the person or their company elsewhere (LinkedIn, the company website) to confirm they are still there.
Write to the complaint. Quote their concern in your own words, explain the specific difference, and offer something small: a comparison, a migration guide, a short call.

A focused hour usually covers fifty to a hundred reviews of one competitor.

What you can and cannot learn

G2's community guidelines say reviewers must validate their identity with a LinkedIn account, a verified business email or a personal email G2 can validate, and validated reviews carry a label. The guidelines also say users can have any review "posted without identifying information (their name, photo, or company)", in which case only their job category and industry appear.

So you can learn, for many reviews: name, title, company size, industry, how long they have used the product, and the full text. For anonymous reviews you learn the role and industry only, which is still useful for market research but not for outreach.

You cannot learn: their email from G2, whether they are the decision-maker, or when their contract renews (unless they say so, which some do).

Etiquette

Do not say "I saw your G2 review" as an opener and then pitch. If you mention it, mention it because it is the honest answer to "how did you find me?".
Never disparage the competitor. The reviewer chose that product; telling them it is bad tells them they chose badly.
Do not contact anonymous reviewers by trying to unmask them.
One message, one follow-up at most.

Hit rate and failure modes

We will not invent a reply rate. What makes G2 prospecting fail:

Ignoring the date. A two-year-old complaint may have been fixed in the competitor's next release.
Targeting category-wide complaints that apply to you as well.
Writing to people who were never the buyer. A daily user who hates the tool may have no say over replacing it. Their complaint is still a good opening to the person who does.
Too few reviews. A small competitor may have a handful of reviews; you will exhaust them in an afternoon.

How Sluice does it

Paste a competitor's G2 review page into Sluice and its reviewers become leads, each with their star rating beside their words. Each reviewer is looked up for role, company and location where a match exists and scored 0 to 100 against your customer profile, including whether their review suggests they have the problem now. The ones at 70 or more are worth contacting, with a link back to the review. Sluice drafts a first message from what they wrote and scores the draft, with a reason, before you can queue it. Nothing is sent unless you approve it.

The honest limits: anonymous reviewers give only a role and industry, so they rarely resolve to a person. And if a reviewer's company is already your customer in HubSpot, Sluice keeps them out of cold outreach.

For the same method on other sites, see Capterra (smaller companies, more service businesses) and Trustpilot. If you are comparing tools that might do this, Sluice vs Clay covers what each is better at.