"We're number X, and Canvas is number 41. So why are you looking at Canvas?"
That was the line Canvas's competitors were using in deals, and the math was on their side.
Canvas, the learning platform that thousands of educators and learners open every day, was sitting at #41 on G2's list of the 50 best education software products, its reviews quietly aging out of relevance.
Six months later, the numbers told a different story: Around 300 reviews collected in a matter of days. A jump from #41 to #1. A brand-new product going from 0 to 4+ stars. On paper, Canvas's run on G2 looks almost too simple.
The real story, however, is complex: a lean two-person team that couldn't get many reviews through conventional channels, an aging profile dragging down a category-leading product, and one decision that changed everything — to meet customers in person instead of in their inboxes.
Canvas is a learning management system used across K-12, higher education, and corporate learning. It is part of the Instructure learning ecosystem. In the academic world, Canvas has made considerable inroads while exploring the corporate learning management system (LMS) segment.
Canvas faced the visibility and peer validation problems as a new entrant in the segment. To tackle this, it set up a dedicated business and government team. “When you have the market share of a sector, it's easy for people to know who you are,” said Brittany Gooding, Senior Marketing Manager at Instructure. “People didn't know that we were playing in the corporate LMS space.”
“We understand the importance of being where the B2B buyer searches, and we know that G2 plays a pivotal role in that space.”
Brittany Gooding
Senior Marketing Manager, Instructure
The goal was to bolster visibility in organic search, on G2's platform, and increasingly in the LLM-driven discovery that buyers now lean on.
The Canvas team tried the usual playbook to build peer validation and proof. CSM outreach. Newsletter asks. An incentive tied to a donation drive. These are proven ways to build reviews over time, and they stayed part of Instructure's mix. But with a busy, hard-to-reach audience, they weren't generating volume fast enough on their own.
“People are busy, and they just didn't want to do another thing,” Brittany said. The company's audience didn't respond to in-app pop-ups, and the digital noise was relentless. “It's just another thing where people are like, I don't mind doing this, but I don't wanna do it.”
The cost of that silence was seen. Canvas's existing reviews were old, and on G2, recency and relevance carry real weight in how products rank. As the reviews decayed, so did the badges. And so did Canvas's standing against competitors who were actively collecting fresh proof. This ranked Canvas 41 on the G2 charts.
“As a marketer, I can tell someone that Canvas is great. But that means way less than them hearing it from people who do the same work that they do every single day.”
Brittany Gooding
Senior Marketing Manager, Instructure
The breakthrough idea came out of a standing biweekly working session with Instructure's G2 CSM team. The question on the table was: How do we actually get reviews?
The answer the team surfaced was a G2 review booth at InstructureCon, the company's annual user conference. This has roughly 3,000 attendees, nearly all of them Canvas advocates.
After Instructure’s go-ahead, G2 carried the load. The review events team ran the intake, specified what the booth needed, and brought tactics to drive traffic, including a swag incentive.
The Canvas team placed the booth right by the registration desk, across from the partner exhibit hall, and steps from where lunch was served. A custom sticker, available only after filling out a review, gave people a reason to stop. A $10 Amazon gift card sealed it. And the on-site team pulled people to leave a review on the spot.
"I did nothing but say hi to them," Brittany said of the G2 team. "G2 handled all of the work. And we got to reap all of the rewards."
The target was about 180 reviews, matching a 2023 booth Instructure had run before Brittany took over the program. They were halfway there in under a day.
By the end, the booth had collected 312 verified reviews for Canvas, well over 100 more than the goal. Every one of them was fresh, specific, and written by the people who use Canvas to do their jobs. These were instructional designers, trainers, educators, and learners.
The new reviews reset Canvas's recency, rebuilt its credibility, and moved the rankings.
The first signal came in the fall and winter quarterly badge releases, where Canvas immediately picked up more badges. The bigger payoff came on a longer timeline. The booth ran in July 2025, and roughly 6–7 months later, the 2026 Best of Education Software list landed, and Canvas had climbed from #41 to #1.
While the booth was not the singular factor behind this dramatic improvement, it did speed up the collection of authentic reviews the product had earned. "We couldn't buy jumping from 41 to one," Brittany said. "We could incentivize people leaving us reviews and actually building that credibility." The booth brought advocates to the table, while the honesty and quality of their reviews did the rest.
The leadership position became a marketing asset across the funnel. The Canvas team built it into paid media campaigns, wrote blog posts staking out the #1 claim, and pulled specific reviews into deals whenever a prospect raised a pain point Canvas could solve. The badges went onto the website, landing pages, and press releases.
Just as important, the booth wasn't a permanent fix. It bought a two-person team time to build a durable review engine so that momentum wouldn't fade as older reviews aged out.
verified G2 reviews collected at one event
on G2's Best of Education Software list
The Canvas booth proved a model, and Instructure moved quickly to extend it. When the company launched Canvas Career, its skills-based workforce learning LMS, in January 2026, the new product had no reviews.
Rather than wait for organic traction, Instructure used G2's Review Managed Services (RMS) to build social proof fast. Under RMS, G2 sources and gathers verified reviews on a customer's behalf, so a lean team doesn't have to run the outreach itself. The Instructure team set a goal of 10 reviews and landed 13–15. The impact on a brand-new listing was immediate.
Where the booth was a one-time, high-energy event for the flagship, RMS has been a quieter, managed engine. It is a repeatable way to build proof for a brand-new listing without a conference to lean on.
For Brittany, the citation gains matter as much as the rankings. Buyers are searching differently now, leaning on AI-driven answers that pull from sources like G2. "If G2's being cited and we're not playing where the players are, then what's the point?" she said.
If Brittany has one piece of advice for a lean team in a similar spot, it's to lean on the partner.
“G2 has been a phenomenal partner,” she said. “Our entire G2 team is invested in our success and is incredibly responsive.”
For two marketers covering an entire sector, that leverage was the difference. "As a professional, I can’t do everything on my own, which is why the partnership with G2 has just been so nice because they owned so much of the work."