They stopped being a lead source years ago. Nobody noticed they had quietly become the thing the machines read instead of you.

1. You are not being read. You are being checked. Quoleady’s 2026 research found that 100% of the tools ChatGPT named in B2B answers had Capterra reviews and 99% had G2 listings. Not most. Effectively all of them. Absence from the review sites is not a weak position. It is not being in the sample.

2. It varies wildly by category, so measure yours. One Q2 2026 sample put the big aggregators at only 8.6% of citations; another found G2 was ChatGPT’s fourth most-cited source overall. Both are probably right for their category and wrong for yours. Run your own prompts before you believe either number, including this sentence.

3. Reviews move revenue even without machines. Michael Luca’s Harvard study of Yelp found that a one-star rating increase was associated with roughly a 5–9% revenue increase for independent restaurants. Chains showed no effect, because their reputation was already established. If you are not famous, the rating is your reputation.

4. Claim the category, then argue about which one. Category placement on these sites decides which comparison you appear in, and most companies accept whatever the site assigned them in 2019. That is your positioning, being decided by a taxonomy editor who has never spoken to you.

5. Volume matters, but recency matters more. A profile with two hundred reviews from four years ago reads as a company that peaked. Ten reviews from this quarter reads as a company with customers. Both people and models weight the fresh ones.

6. Ask in the moment of relief, not the moment of renewal. The right time is right after you fixed something hard, not when you are asking for money. Everyone who has ever run a service business knows this and almost nobody builds it into the process.

7. Do not gate, filter or bribe. The FTC’s 2024 rule on fake and suppressed reviews carries civil penalties that run into the tens of thousands of dollars per violation. Review gating – only routing happy customers to the public form – is squarely in scope. The shortcut is now the expensive option.

8. Answer the bad ones in public, briefly. Not to win. To be seen being reasonable by the next hundred readers, and by whatever is summarizing the page. A defensive four-paragraph reply is worse than the review.

9. Then read yours as a research document. Your own reviews are unpaid, unprompted, buyer-language descriptions of what you are actually for. Most companies’ positioning statements are worse written and less accurate than their own three-star reviews.

The bottom line. This is a two-week project with no creative brief, no agency and no design phase, and it determines whether you exist inside the systems your buyers now use first. It is not glamorous. Neither is having your category discussed without you in it.