A glowing G2 review is one of the few pieces of social proof you didn't have to chase — the customer sat down, unprompted, and wrote several paragraphs about why your product worked for them. The instinct to lift that text straight onto your homepage is understandable, and it's also where most teams create a quiet mess: a review posted on a third-party platform is not automatically yours to republish, the attribution G2 shows is not the attribution you're allowed to reuse, and the shape of a review is not the shape of a good website testimonial. Turning one into the other is a real process, not a copy-paste. Done right, it converts a review sitting on someone else's domain into a proof point working on yours — with the customer's blessing and without a terms-of-service problem.
Start by picking the right review, not the best one
The most enthusiastic review is not always the most reusable one. Before you fall in love with a five-star rave, screen it against what a website testimonial actually needs to do.
- Look for specificity over sentiment. "Best tool ever, love it" is a strong star rating and a weak testimonial. The review worth reusing names a role, a use case, an outcome, or a number — something a prospect on your site can map onto their own situation.
- Check whether the reviewer is identifiable. G2 lets some reviewers post with limited profiles. A testimonial with a real name, title, and company is dramatically more credible than "Verified User in Marketing." Prioritize reviews where the person is willing to stand behind their words publicly.
- Prefer the review that answers an objection. If prospects hesitate about onboarding time, security, or switching cost, a review that speaks directly to that hesitation is worth more on your site than a general endorsement, however warm.
Picking well at this stage saves you from asking for permission to reuse a quote that wouldn't have earned its place on the page anyway.
Get permission — the review being public isn't the same as being yours
This is the step teams skip, and it's the one that matters most. A public review is public on G2. Republishing it on your own marketing site is a separate act that needs two things.
- Respect the platform's terms. Review platforms have their own rules about how their content can be reused off-platform, and many require attribution back to the source or restrict commercial reuse. Check G2's current terms rather than assuming a public post is a free asset. When in doubt, the safe path is to go to the person, not the platform.
- Ask the reviewer directly. The clean way to reuse a review is to contact the customer and ask permission to feature their words on your website, with their name and company. This does double duty: it keeps you on the right side of both platform terms and the customer relationship, and it opens the door to updating or extending the quote.
- Get it in writing. A short email reply — "Yes, you can use my review on your site with my name and title" — is enough to keep. Store it with the testimonial so anyone on your team can confirm the quote is cleared for use later.
The permission conversation is also your best opportunity to improve the quote, which is the next step.
Reshape the review into a testimonial
A review is written for a review site: it may have pros-and-cons sections, star breakdowns, and a length that suits a browsing buyer comparing tools. A website testimonial needs to be tighter and more pointed.
- Extract the strongest sentence or two. You rarely want the whole review. Pull the fragment that carries the outcome or the objection-rebuttal, and let the rest go. Shorter quotes get read; long ones get skimmed past.
- Never change the meaning — and confirm any trim. You can cut for length, but you cannot edit words into the customer's mouth. If your trim changes the emphasis at all, run the shortened version past the reviewer when you ask permission. It's one message and it protects the quote's integrity.
- Add the attribution the review lacked. Reviews often show a truncated identity. When you ask permission, ask for the full name, title, company, and ideally a headshot or logo. Specific attribution is what separates a credible testimonial from an anonymous blurb.
The finished testimonial should read as if it were written for your page, because — with the customer's sign-off — it now belongs there.
Where the reused review does its best work
A repurposed G2 review carries an extra signal a native testimonial doesn't: it started as an unsolicited public review, which many buyers trust more precisely because the customer wrote it without your prompting. Lean into that.
- Link back to the source where you can. If platform terms and the customer are comfortable with it, a small "originally posted on G2" link turns a claim into something a skeptical prospect can independently verify.
- Place it near a matching objection. Put the reused review where its content lands — a security-focused quote near your security section, an onboarding quote near your getting-started content.
- Keep the original review live, too. Reusing the words on your site doesn't mean pulling them from G2. The review working in both places compounds your proof rather than moving it.
Turning a G2 review into a website testimonial is one of the highest-leverage things a proof program can do, because the hardest part — getting a customer to write something genuine and detailed — is already done. Managing the permission, attribution, and reshaping in one place is exactly the kind of workflow ProofShow is built to handle, so a great review never sits stranded on a platform you don't control.