How to Use Clearbit: A Simple Guide and Tutorial

Your CRM has hundreds of leads who signed up with just an email address. You know where to reach them, but you don't know what company they work for, how many employees that company has, what industry they're in, or what funding stage they're at. Qualifying those leads manually — company by company, one lookup at a time — is a full-time job nobody has capacity for.

Clearbit is a B2B data enrichment platform that solves this by automatically appending detailed company and person data to records you already have — turning an email address or company domain into a rich profile with firmographic, demographic, and technographic information. Acquired by HubSpot in late 2023 and now available as part of HubSpot's ecosystem, Clearbit's enrichment capabilities remain widely used by marketing, sales, and operations teams for lead enrichment, CRM hygiene, and sales intelligence workflows. This guide covers what Clearbit does, how its core products work, and how to use them step by step.

What Is Clearbit?

Clearbit is a B2B data enrichment platform that converts minimal contact information — typically an email address or company domain — into comprehensive business intelligence records covering company firmographics, employee contact data, technology usage, and real-time company signals.

Its core product is data enrichment: you provide a known data point (an email address, a company domain, an IP address), and Clearbit returns a structured data package from its database of company and person records. A lead who signed up with only their work email comes back from Clearbit with their name, job title, company name, company size, industry, funding status, technology stack, and more — automatically, in real time, without a human doing the research.

Clearbit's acquisition by HubSpot in 2023 means its capabilities are increasingly integrated into HubSpot's CRM and marketing platform under HubSpot Enrichment branding, while the standalone API and integrations remain available. Whether you're accessing Clearbit through a native HubSpot integration, a CRM plugin for Salesforce, or the API directly, the underlying enrichment capability is the same.

How Clearbit Data Enrichment Works

Clearbit maintains a continuously updated database of business records, compiled from a range of data sources including public business data, company websites, professional networking data, and proprietary signals. When you query Clearbit with an email or domain, it searches this database and returns the matching record in a structured format — typically as a JSON response if you're using the API, or as automatically populated CRM fields if you're using a native integration.

The enrichment operates through two primary data types:

Company data is keyed to a domain — you provide a domain like acme.com and Clearbit returns the company's legal name, industry classification, employee count range, annual revenue estimate, geographic headquarters, founding year, total funding raised, technology stack (which marketing tools, analytics platforms, and software vendors they use), and social media handles. This firmographic and technographic data is what powers use cases like lead scoring, ideal customer profile matching, and account-based marketing segmentation.

Person data is keyed to a work email address — you provide someone's email and Clearbit returns their full name, job title, seniority level, department, LinkedIn URL, and whether their email is likely valid. Person enrichment is what powers form shortening (displaying only an email field and populating everything else), CRM contact record completion, and sales rep routing based on deal size or account tier.

Reveal is Clearbit's IP-to-company identification product — when an anonymous visitor lands on your website, Reveal uses their IP address to identify which company they're likely visiting from, even if they haven't submitted a form. This enables intent-based outreach to companies actively visiting your site without any form completion.

According to Clearbit's own documentation, enrichment API responses are returned in real time for synchronous lookups and can also be processed in batch for existing database enrichment of large historical lists.

Step-by-Step Guide: Using Clearbit's Core Features

Step 1: Access Clearbit Through Your Platform

Clearbit is available through several access paths depending on your existing tools. If you use HubSpot, access HubSpot Enrichment (powered by Clearbit) directly within your HubSpot portal — it can be configured to automatically enrich contacts and companies as they're created. For Salesforce users, Clearbit offers a native Salesforce integration. For developers or teams using the API directly, API keys are available through your Clearbit account dashboard.

For the purpose of this guide, we'll cover both the integration-based workflow (what most non-technical users will use) and the API workflow (relevant for developers building custom enrichment into existing systems).

Step 2: Enrich Existing CRM Records

The most common first use of Clearbit is enriching existing contacts in your CRM — appending company data to leads who provided only an email address when signing up.

In the HubSpot integration, this runs automatically once configured: any new contact created in HubSpot is enriched in the background, with company and person data flowing into the corresponding HubSpot contact and company properties. For bulk enrichment of historical records, Clearbit's Enrichment API accepts batch requests.

Using the API to enrich a contact by email address follows this pattern (using Python):

import requests

CLEARBIT_API_KEY = "your-clearbit-api-key"

def enrich_person(email: str) -> dict | None:
    """
    Enrich a person record using Clearbit's Person API.
    Returns enriched person and company data, or None if not found.
    """
    response = requests.get(
        "https://person.clearbit.com/v2/combined/find",
        params={"email": email},
        auth=(CLEARBIT_API_KEY, ""),  # Clearbit uses HTTP Basic Auth with API key
        timeout=10
    )
    if response.status_code == 200:
        return response.json()
    elif response.status_code == 404:
        print(f"No record found for: {email}")
        return None
    else:
        print(f"API error {response.status_code}: {response.text}")
        return None

result = enrich_person("someone@company.com")
if result:
    person = result.get("person", {})
    company = result.get("company", {})
    print(f"Name: {person.get('name', {}).get('fullName')}")
    print(f"Title: {person.get('employment', {}).get('title')}")
    print(f"Company: {company.get('name')}")
    print(f"Employees: {company.get('metrics', {}).get('employees')}")
    print(f"Industry: {company.get('category', {}).get('industry')}")

The /v2/combined/find endpoint returns both person and company data in a single request — more efficient than querying each separately when you need both. The response schema follows Clearbit's documented structure; the field paths above reflect the actual response object hierarchy.

Step 3: Implement Form Shortening

One of Clearbit's most popular B2B use cases is progressive form shortening: instead of asking for company name, company size, job title, and phone number on signup forms, you collect only an email address and use Clearbit's enrichment to populate the rest automatically.

This is implemented on the front end using Clearbit's Forms JavaScript snippet, which intercepts the email field value, queries Clearbit in real time, and pre-populates hidden form fields with enriched data before the form submits. The user sees a simple form with one visible field; your CRM or marketing automation receives a fully enriched record.

The implementation requires adding Clearbit's form snippet to your page and configuring which form fields map to which Clearbit data points. Detailed setup documentation is available in the Clearbit developer docs.

Step 4: Set Up Website Reveal for Anonymous Visitor Intelligence

Reveal identifies the company behind anonymous IP addresses visiting your website — useful for account-based marketing programs and sales teams who want to know which target accounts are actively researching before any form submission.

Implementation requires adding the Reveal JavaScript snippet to your website. Once active, Reveal processes each page visitor's IP address, identifies the likely company, and can push that identification into your analytics, marketing automation, or directly to your CRM as a "company viewed website" event. This feeds lead scoring models and can trigger outbound sales outreach to companies showing intent before they've raised their hand.

Step 5: Use Enrichment in Lead Scoring and Segmentation

Enriched company data is what makes CRM-based lead scoring and ICP matching actually work. With company size, industry, technology stack, and funding stage populated on every lead record, you can define scoring rules like:

Company has more than 100 employees: +15 points
Industry matches target verticals: +20 points
Uses specific technology in their stack: +10 points
Total funding raised above $10M: +10 points

Without enrichment, these scoring dimensions require manual research. With Clearbit enrichment running automatically, they populate in real time as leads enter your system — and historical records can be enriched in batch to apply scoring retroactively.

Common Challenges and Limitations

Match rate varies by target market. Clearbit's database has better coverage for US-based technology companies and startups than for small businesses, non-English-speaking markets, or industries with less online presence. If your customer base skews toward SMBs, local businesses, or emerging markets, expect a meaningful fraction of enrichment requests to return null — indicating no matching record was found. Plan for this in your workflow: records without enrichment need a fallback path rather than simply being skipped.

Data freshness requires understanding. Clearbit's database is continuously refreshed, but individual company records aren't necessarily updated at a fixed cadence. A company that went through a major restructuring or changed its employee count significantly may have a record that lags the reality by weeks or months. For time-sensitive signals like recent funding rounds, validate with a primary source rather than relying solely on enriched data.

The API has rate limits and error handling requirements. The enrichment API is synchronous and fast for individual lookups, but high-volume batch enrichment requires managing rate limits, handling 202 Accepted responses for asynchronous lookups (where Clearbit processes the enrichment and notifies you via webhook), and implementing retry logic for transient errors. The API documentation covers these edge cases — don't assume every request returns an immediate 200 OK.

HubSpot integration context changes the product. Since the acquisition, Clearbit's product evolution is increasingly tied to HubSpot's roadmap. Teams using Clearbit outside of HubSpot should stay informed about how the product's availability and feature set may evolve, and maintain awareness of licensing terms that may differ from pre-acquisition arrangements.

Conclusion

Clearbit converts a bare email address or company domain into a structured business intelligence record — automatically, in real time, and without manual research. Whether you're enriching CRM contacts as they arrive, shortening signup forms to reduce friction, scoring leads against your ideal customer profile, or identifying anonymous website visitors by company, the same enrichment data enables each workflow. The technical implementation ranges from a no-code native HubSpot integration to a direct API call for custom data pipelines, making it accessible across technical skill levels.

The most valuable entry point is enriching your existing database — running historical leads through the enrichment API surfaces the company data you never collected and makes scoring, segmentation, and outreach targeting significantly more precise.

What We Learned

Clearbit enrichment converts minimal contact data into full firmographic records: A single email address returns company size, industry, funding, technology stack, and person details — eliminating manual research.
Person and company enrichment are separate but often queried together: The /v2/combined/find endpoint returns both in one request, covering the most common use case efficiently.
Form shortening is one of the highest-ROI Clearbit use cases: Reducing forms to a single email field increases submission rates while delivering more enriched data to your CRM than a longer form would have captured.
Match rate varies by market segment: SMBs, non-US markets, and non-tech industries have lower Clearbit database coverage — plan fallback handling for records that don't return a match.
Reveal enables pre-form intent signals: Identifying company visitors before any form submission supports account-based marketing with timing that form-only workflows can't match.
The HubSpot acquisition means the product is evolving: Teams using Clearbit outside of HubSpot should track product direction and licensing as Clearbit's capabilities integrate more deeply into HubSpot's ecosystem.

FAQ

What is Clearbit used for?

Clearbit is a B2B data enrichment platform used to automatically append company and person data to existing lead and contact records — converting an email address or company domain into a structured profile with firmographic data (company size, industry, funding), technographic data (technology stack), and person details (job title, seniority). It's used for lead scoring, CRM enrichment, form shortening, account-based marketing, and identifying anonymous website visitors.
How does Clearbit enrichment work?

When you provide Clearbit with an email address or company domain — through the API, a native CRM integration, or HubSpot Enrichment — it searches its database of company and person records and returns the matching data in a structured format. For email enrichment, it returns both person data (name, title, seniority) and company data (industry, employee count, funding, technology stack). For domain enrichment, it returns company-level data without the person layer.
Is Clearbit now part of HubSpot?

Yes. HubSpot acquired Clearbit in November 2023 and has been integrating its enrichment capabilities into HubSpot's platform as HubSpot Enrichment. The standalone Clearbit API and third-party integrations (including Salesforce) remain available, but the product's development roadmap is now tied to HubSpot's priorities. Teams using Clearbit outside HubSpot should confirm current product availability and licensing directly with HubSpot/Clearbit.
What is Clearbit Reveal?

Clearbit Reveal is an IP-to-company identification product that identifies which company an anonymous website visitor is likely browsing from, using their IP address, without requiring a form submission. It enables account-based marketing teams to see which target accounts are visiting their site and supports sales outreach to companies showing intent before they've converted. It's implemented as a JavaScript snippet added to your website.
How accurate is Clearbit's data?

Clearbit's accuracy varies by company size, geography, and industry. US-based technology companies and startups with strong online presence tend to have the most accurate and complete records. Smaller companies, businesses in non-English-speaking markets, or companies in less-documented industries may have less complete records or not appear in the database at all. For time-sensitive signals like recent funding or headcount, validation against primary sources is advisable for high-stakes use cases.