Who Decides What Your Software Is?

Nobody starts a company by picking a software category.

The thinking is more like: this process is broken, I know people who'd pay for something better, let me build it. You build. People use it. You grow. "Graphic Design Software" or "Creative Management Platform" never enters the conversation — you're solving a problem for people who have it.

Categories show up later, when you start working on your visibility posture to improve your SEO and AEO and want to get listed on a software directory. That's when you discover that someone already decided what your product is supposed to be — based on a feature checklist that doesn't correspond to your product or what your users are asking for.

Directory Data Feeds AI Recommendations

Directory data is structured. It's categorized. Feature lists, review text, competitive comparisons — all pre-organized into a format that's computationally efficient to scan. Combined with verified reviews that software sellers have no control over, this becomes a very valuable data source for any system trying to make reliable recommendations. Research by Profound found that AI is 6.5x more likely to cite third-party platforms than your own website.

Your category placement shapes your reviews, your scores, your badge eligibility, and your competitive set. And increasingly, it shapes your AI search visibility — how AI systems learn what your product is and who to recommend it to.

We received a rejection email on behalf of a client that shows exactly how this plays out.

"We Were Unable to Add It to a Suitable Category"

The product: a design collaboration tool used by hundreds of design teams. In our assessment, it fits both the Graphic Design and Creative Management categories — the same categories where its competitors are listed.

The response, paraphrased from the platform's review team: your product is missing mandatory features required for these categories. Specifically:

• CAD Tools — think AutoCAD, SolidWorks; precision technical drawings for engineering and architecture
• Design Templates — pre-built templates with flowcharts, mindmaps, wireframes, org charts
• Image Editing — edit, touch up, and convert images for publishing
• Project Management — plan and coordinate resources, costs, and time for assignments

The product helps design teams collaborate on getting designs ready for publishing. Whether that involves CAD functionality or precision technical illustration is beside the point for the teams using it — they chose the tool because it solves their workflow. But the category definition says Graphic Design software must include CAD capabilities. So: no listing, right next to the competitors who serve the same buyers.

The platform was polite about it. They offered to reconsider with documentation. They even acknowledged that some existing products in the category might have been added based on vendor-provided screenshots rather than verified feature checks. We eventually got the product listed in Creative Management by providing additional documentation — but most founders wouldn't know that's an option. If you've run into something similar, we wrote a step-by-step guide on appealing directory rejections.

Every Platform Built a Different System

Every major platform maintains its own taxonomy for classifying what software does and where it belongs. G2 has 29 full-time research analysts curating over 2,100 categories. Capterra has 900+ with different definitions. Each specifies what a product must do, and often which features it must have, to qualify. A CRM that does CRM things lands in the right place without friction. The trouble starts when products serve the same buyers through a different approach — fewer features, a different workflow, a different entry point into the same problem.

We know this firsthand. Blastra was initially placed on G2 into "Review Platforms" alongside Clutch and UpCity — tools that do something quite different from what we do. "SaaS Listings Management" doesn't exist as a G2 category. So we went through options with an analyst: SEO? Reputation Management? We ended up in "Other Marketing Software" — a catch-all launchpad, similar to G2's "Other AI Software" category that we covered recently.

Some founders have navigated this by proposing entirely new categories. One documented on Indie Hackers how they contacted G2, proposed "Notification Infrastructure," provided 10 fitting competitors, and four months later became the top product in a category they helped define. Gong went through a similar process years earlier, reframing their space from "Conversation Intelligence" to "Revenue Intelligence" — a story their former CMO Udi Ledergor describes in his book Courageous Marketing. G2 adds 5-10 new categories per month and encourages this, but most founders don't think about categories until they get a rejection like the one above.

The fragmentation is recognized. When G2 acquired Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice from Gartner Digital Markets in early 2026, one of the headline promises was a "single, market-leading taxonomy" — merging four separate classification systems into one. That's a meaningful commitment. How it plays out for vendors like the one in our rejection email remains to be seen.

In the meantime, it might be worth checking which category your product is actually in — on every platform where you're listed — and whether that category describes what you do or what a different product does. Blastra's Visibility Posture assessment does this across all major directories as part of onboarding. "SaaS Listings Management" doesn't have its own category yet, so we're solving this uncategorized, together with thousands of other marketing software solutions.