How to Turn Your Case Studies Into G2 Reviews (Without Breaking G2 or FTC Rules)

Ask for the G2 review in the days after the customer approves their case study, and never write it for them. In our reading, pointing a customer back to the story they approved is fine; drafting the review, or tying a gift to a good rating, breaks G2's rules and the FTC's.

Why do case studies make good G2 review requests?

A customer who has just approved a case study has done three things a cold review request never gets. They have talked through specifics: what was broken, what changed, what happened next. They have read it back in print and agreed it is accurate. And they have told you, by approving it, that they are willing to put their name next to your product.

That makes the case study the best moment in the customer relationship to ask for a third-party review. It is also a pool you already hold. In our Customer Proof Index 2026, 61.0% of 954 B2B software companies we could reach publish at least one written case study. The study is ours and drawn from one directory's listings, so read it as directional. Even so, it shows how common the starting point is: a company with a published case study usually already has a customer who agreed to be named (84.8% of the 335 companies with readable stories in the Index named the customer), and that is the warmest place to start a review ask.

The rest of this post is about asking without crossing a line. Advice online contradicts itself here: some of it says you may hand the customer suggested wording, some says you may not touch it. We went to the primary sources.

What do G2's rules say about asking for reviews?

G2 publishes its rules in its community guidelines and on its page about how reviews, data and rankings work. Here is what we read there, on 2026-10-16.

What you can do. G2 lets vendors ask customers for honest and unbiased reviews. It also lets you offer a small thank-you: G2 caps the value of any review incentive at $100 USD across all campaigns and incentive types, including gift cards and non-cash items such as swag or credits.

What you cannot do.

• ●Condition a gift on a positive review. G2 says eligibility for an incentive is never based on the opinion expressed, positive or negative.
• ●Hide an incentive from G2. Offering a thank-you without disclosing it to G2 is a violation.
• ●Collect reviews in a way that screens out negative ones. G2's business guidelines name any method that segments out potentially negative reviews or exclusively targets positive ones. G2 also says that if it finds a seller soliciting only positive reviews, it will remove the reviews.
• ●Pressure a reviewer. Contacting a reviewer to influence, coerce or pressure them is not allowed, and neither is discouraging negative reviews.
• ●Submit a review someone else wrote. G2's reviewer guidelines list reviews written on behalf of someone else as not allowed, and they bar using AI to write reviews for another person or to replicate their feedback.

G2's own guidance on review collection (a 2022 G2 article) adds a practical point about sampling. It tells vendors to pull a list that is representative of the customer base, not a segment skewed toward happy customers, and to avoid wording that could read as asking only for favorable feedback. G2 also notes that confirmed incentivized reviews carry an "Incentivized" label, and that reviews solicited without an incentive are weighted more heavily in its Satisfaction scoring. A plain ask is not the weaker option.

What does the FTC rule add?

The FTC's Trade Regulation Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) went into effect on October 21, 2024. The FTC can seek civil penalties against knowing violators. Four parts matter for this workflow.

Writing reviews that misrepresent the experience (§465.2). It is an unfair or deceptive practice to write, create or sell a consumer review that materially misrepresents that the reviewer exists, used the product, or had a particular experience with it. A review you draft and a customer pastes in, describing an experience they did not describe, is the risk case.

Gifts tied to sentiment (§465.4). A business may not provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, reviews expressing a particular sentiment. The "by implication" part matters: a gift card that arrives only after a five-star rating is conditioned even if your email never says so. FTC guidance says incentives are fine as long as there is no express or implied requirement that the review take a particular sentiment.

Suppressing reviews (§465.7). You cannot use unfounded legal threats, physical threats, intimidation or a public false accusation to get a review removed, and you cannot misrepresent a filtered set of reviews as all or most of the reviews you received.

Only asking happy customers. The FTC's Q&A on the rule answers this one directly: the rule does not contain a specific prohibition against asking only customers you think are happy, but the practice could violate the FTC Act. The rule also exempts generalized solicitations sent to purchasers from two of its provisions, and the FTC's preamble says solicitations made only to customers a business believes are happy are not generalized solicitations.

Supplying text. The FTC's guidance says a business should not provide the text for a testimonial without a reasonable basis to conclude the text is truthful. That guidance was written about testimonials, and it is not the safe harbor it sounds like for G2, because G2's own rule against reviews written on behalf of someone else is stricter. For a G2 review, treat drafting as off limits.

The FTC's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) say the same thing from the reader's side. An endorsement must reflect the honest opinions or experience of the endorser, and a connection that could affect how much weight people give the review, such as a payment or free product, must be disclosed clearly. The Guides' own example of reviewers paid to post reviews says undisclosed incentives are likely deceptive.

One scope caveat. The rule defines a consumer review as a consumer's evaluation of a product, service or business, and the FTC's preamble says a consumer is a person who purchased, used or otherwise had experience with it. The rule text and the FTC Q&A we read do not address business-to-business reviews directly. G2's rules list non-compliance with FTC guidelines as a violation of its own, so the practical answer is the same either way: follow both. This post is not legal advice.

Can you pre-write or suggest the review text?

No. Advice online disagrees on this, and some guides and AI answers go as far as telling you to send the customer the headline metric from their case study to paste into G2. The primary sources are not ambiguous once you read G2's rule rather than the FTC's testimonial guidance. G2 does not allow reviews written on behalf of someone else, and the FTC bans creating reviews that misrepresent a reviewer's experience. A vendor-drafted review fails the first test on its face.

Here is where each action sits, with the rule that decides it.

The memory-aid row is the one neither source speaks to directly, so it is a judgment. The line we hold is topics, not sentences: you may remind a customer that they talked about, say, cutting onboarding from six weeks to nine days. You do not hand them a paragraph, a star rating or a quote to paste.

When should you ask, and what is the workflow?

The honest workflow uses the case study as a memory aid, not a script.

1. ●The customer tells their story. In a StoryVoice interview, they talk for about five minutes, by voice on their phone, and the AI interviewer asks for the concrete example and the before and after. The specifics are theirs.
2. ●They approve the finished case study. This is the high point of goodwill. Our guide to the case study approval process covers how to make that step quick.
3. ●You ask for the G2 review within a few days. One short email, with the link, saying an honest review of any kind is welcome and nothing is required.
4. ●You point them to their own words. The email links back to the story they approved, so they can see what they said. They write the review themselves, and G2 validates the reviewer's identity itself.
5. ●You send one reminder at most. After that, stop. Pressure is the part that breaks the rules.

Do not make case study customers your only source of reviews. They are a self-selected group of satisfied customers, which is exactly the skew G2 tells vendors to avoid. Send the same request to a representative list of customers as well, and treat the case study customers as the warmest part of it. The mechanics of who to approach for the story in the first place are in getting customers to agree.

Two ways to widen that list without changing the rules. First, ask your case study champion whether the colleagues who use the product every day may get the same request; they each send their own honest review, and one story can open a whole team. Second, G2 runs Self-Service Review Campaigns inside my.G2: you get a branded review landing page, and either share the link yourself or upload a contact list and G2 sends one invitation and two reminders. A campaign can be incentivized, with a gift card amount you set, or not, and incentivized campaigns are billed only for reviews that pass G2's moderation (G2 documentation). Use the campaign for the representative list and keep the case study ask as the personal one.

What does a compliant review-request email look like?

Copy this. It asks for an honest review of any kind, links to the page, points to the customer's own approved story, and attaches no condition to anything.

Subject: Would you review [Product] on G2?

Hi [First name],

Thanks again for approving your story last week. It went live here: [case study link].

If you have five minutes, would you be willing to share your honest experience of [Product] on G2? A review of any kind helps other buyers decide, and whatever you write is up to you. The link is: [G2 review link].

If it helps to jog your memory, your approved story has the specifics you shared with us. Please write the review in your own words.

[Optional, only if you are offering a gift: As a thank-you for your time, we'll send a [$X gift card, no more than $100] to anyone who completes a review, whatever it says. We will disclose this to G2, and G2 labels reviews that involve a thank-you as incentivized.]

No pressure either way, and thank you.

[Your name]

Three details are doing work here. "Of any kind" and "whatever it says" remove any implied condition on sentiment. "In your own words" keeps authorship with the customer. And the optional gift paragraph stays out entirely unless you will actually disclose it to G2.

How do you use the case study without drafting the review?

The case study is useful to the review in a quiet way: it makes your customer fluent about their own results. A customer who read a page that says "onboarding went from six weeks to nine days" can write that sentence from memory in a G2 form, and the specificity makes the review more useful to the next buyer than a bare score.

Do not turn that into a script. A short, specific review the customer wrote themselves is worth more than a polished one they did not. Keep the other assets from the same interview for other jobs: the LinkedIn post, the X post, the pull quote and the sales email, which are covered in how to repurpose a case study.

Third-party reviews are one of several kinds of proof, and customer proof platforms split the work into four jobs.

How does StoryVoice fit in?

StoryVoice does the part that comes before the review. You enter the customer's details, a voice AI interviews them for about five minutes on their phone, it writes the case study in their voice, they approve it by link, and you get four assets: a LinkedIn post, an X post, a pull quote and a sales email. Then you publish. It is text only, with no video or booked call. StoryVoice does not write or submit G2 reviews, by design: the review has to be the customer's own.

A real customer story costs $39, $99 for three or $149 for five, with credits that never expire. You can interview yourself free first, with no credit card, to see a finished story.

When should you not use this approach?

Skip the case study route if the customer never agreed to the story. A review request that follows an unanswered approval request lands cold and reads as pressure. Skip the gift if you are not prepared to disclose it to G2. And skip any request that would reach only your top accounts: ask a representative group, and accept the result.

Pick this workflow if you already have customers who approve stories and no G2 reviews to match. Pick a wider survey-style ask if your goal is a representative rating spread, and use the case study customers as one input. Pick neither if you cannot accept a critical review: that is the one thing the rules do not let you avoid.

Get the story before you ask for the review. Interview yourself free, then $39 for each real customer story.

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G2 rules were read on 2026-10-16 from legal.g2.com/community-guidelines, g2.com/ai-instructions and learn.g2.com/ftc-guidelines-for-reviews (published 2022-10-19, G2's interpretation of FTC guidance, not the FTC's own wording). FTC sources: 16 CFR Part 465 (sections 465.1, 465.2, 465.4, 465.7 via law.cornell.edu), the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule Q&A on ftc.gov, the Federal Register notice 89 FR 68034 (2024-08-22), and 16 CFR 255.1 and 255.5. Customer Proof Index figure: StoryVoice's own study, published 2026-08-21. This is not legal advice; confirm specifics with counsel and G2 before running a campaign. Rules change; last updated 2026-10-16.