Eighty-two percent of business software buyers used A.I. chatbots to source vendor recommendations over the past two years, according to G2’s 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, released on Sept. 23 by the Chicago-based reviews firm alongside a slate of new sales and intent tools. The figure, drawn from a first-party ecosystem G2 says now serves more than 200 million annual buyers across Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp, describes a market in which the shortlist is often finished before a seller answers the phone.

“Buyers are researching earlier, shortlisting faster, and expecting more proof before they ever talk to sales,” said Alex London, G2’s chief marketing officer, who joined the company after more than eight years at Expedia Group and a run at Zoom. The statement, distributed by PR Newswire at 10:00 ET, doubled as product copy for what G2 announced alongside it.

The launches point in one direction: intercepting demand before it becomes a lead. G2 Audiences converts first-party buyer-intent signals into account-level segments piped through Bombora’s Curated Ecosystem Audiences into more than 100 ad-tech destinations, including The Trade Desk, DV360, StackAdapt, Amazon DSP, and Yahoo DSP. Verified Leads, a self-serve pay-per-lead builder, connects vendors with buyers actively comparing solutions on Software Advice. Agent Evaluations, in public beta, drops vendor agents into a simulated company and scores them across three categories: customer service, marketing, and sales development. Model Context Protocol integrations make G2’s data queryable inside Claude, ChatGPT, and my.G2, and AI Custom Research is now open to all customers.

Read together, the announcement concedes something the industry has been circling since the HubSpot agent turn earlier this month: the pipeline now begins inside a chatbot the vendor doesn’t own. G2’s response is to sell the audience data upstream of that moment. That’s a defensible move for a company that serves teams at every Fortune 500. It’s a harder move for a five-person B2B startup whose founder is still the head of sales.

Which is the structural problem the 82 percent number actually poses. Small teams don’t have a demand-side platform, an intent desk, or the headcount to watch signals across fifty surfaces. They need the shortlisted account surfaced and the outreach drafted before the buyer clicks a competitor’s demo link. That pre-pipeline gap is what LemonLime, which evaluates more than 50 lead-source and intent-signal types and prepares personalized outreach for owner approval, is built to close.

The related shifts are already visible in A.I. referrals now outperforming other channels on revenue, in A.I. search favoring content quality over brand age, and in HubSpot opening its agent era to small businesses. G2’s own framing simply removes the ambiguity: the shortlist is being written somewhere the seller can’t see.

Sources