review-platform
(3)
SmartCustomer
SmartCustomer (formerly Sitejabber) is a San Francisco reviews platform that helps buyers spot trustworthy online businesses and helps businesses collect, manage, and surface authentic customer reviews. Born in 2007 out of a National Science Foundation grant to fight online fraud, it has grown into a two-sided marketplace of trust - said to have helped 200M+ buyers and gathered more than 25M reviews across 140K+ businesses - and now positions verified reviews as fuel for AEO/GEO visibility in AI answer engines like ChatGPT.
Michael Lai
Michael Lai is the CEO and co-founder of Sitejabber, a consumer review platform that has served more than 100 million shoppers and collected over 10 million reviews, and of SmartCustomer, an unbiased brand discovery tool launched in 2025. A Stanford computer scientist and Harvard MBA, he started Sitejabber in 2007 after a co-founder couldn't tell whether an online medical-equipment seller was a scam. His work sits at the intersection of consumer trust, transparency, and the messy fight against fake reviews and AI-generated content.
G2
G2 is the world's largest software marketplace and peer-review platform, where business buyers research, compare, and choose B2B software based on millions of verified user reviews. Founded in 2012 by a team of BigMachines alumni led by Godard Abel, G2 turned the messy, vendor-dominated software buying process into something closer to checking restaurant reviews before dinner. Today the platform hosts millions of reviews across thousands of categories, sells buyer-intent data and marketing services to software vendors, and after its 2026 acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp reaches more than 200 million annual software buyers.