What is Clearbit used for in marketing?
Clearbit is a B2B data provider that supplies the facts about companies and the people who work at them. Give it a website domain, and it returns the company's industry, employee count, estimated revenue, funding, location, and the technologies its website runs on. Give it a work email, and it returns the person's name, job title, seniority, and employer. Marketing and sales teams use those details to decide which leads fit, send them to the right rep, and write messages that make sense for the reader. HubSpot bought Clearbit in 2023, and teams with a Clearbit API key can still look up companies and people directly.
An AI marketer uses Clearbit for the step between having a domain, a name, or an email address and knowing whether that lead is worth pursuing. Kite looks up the missing details, compares each company with your ideal customer profile, and puts the result where your team already works.
Marketing jobs Kite can do with Clearbit
Kite's Clearbit work falls into six jobs. The first three fill in what's missing about leads you already have. The next two find new companies and people. The last one covers where the results go.
Fill in company details from a domain
Kite looks up a company in Clearbit by its website domain and fills in the details your records are missing. Say your HubSpot has 900 companies created from trial signups last quarter, and most have a domain but no industry, employee count, or annual revenue. Kite reads those records and sends each domain to Clearbit. It gets back the company's industry and sector, employee range, estimated annual revenue, funding raised, headquarters location, founding year, and website technology. For a public company, Clearbit also returns its stock ticker and market value.
That turns a column of domains into accounts your team can qualify. A domain like northwindfreight.com tells you very little. "Freight software, 240 employees, raised $38 million, runs Salesforce and Segment" tells your sales team whether to call.
Find the domain when you only have a company name
Kite converts a company's name into its website domain with Clearbit, so a list without domains can still be filled in. This comes up with lists your team didn't build, such as a conference's sponsor page, a partner directory, or a spreadsheet a founder typed up after a trade show. Each row says "Acme Robotics" or "Lumen Health" and nothing else.
Clearbit returns the domain that most likely belongs to that exact name, along with the company's logo. Kite confirms each match against the other facts on the list, such as the city or the industry, and then looks the company up by its domain.
Learn who's behind an email address
Kite looks up a person in Clearbit from their email address. When someone requests a demo with only a work email, Kite asks Clearbit who they are. It gets back their name, job title, role, seniority, location, and employer, along with their LinkedIn and X profiles where Clearbit has them. With the employer's domain in hand, Kite looks up the company as well.
Kite then compares the person and the company with your ideal customer profile and drafts a reply that speaks to their actual job. A finance director at a 300-person logistics company gets a different first message from a student who signed up with a university address. Your team knows which conversation matters before anyone opens the inbox.
Find companies that match your ideal customer
Kite searches Clearbit's company database for new accounts that match your ideal customer profile. It writes the search from what it already knows about your business. If you sell payroll software to restaurant groups, Kite might search for US restaurant companies with 50 to 1,000 employees and set aside the ones that are already your customers.
Clearbit can sort the results by employee count, funding raised, market value, or how closely each company matches the search. Kite picks the order that fits your goal. When your product suits businesses that are growing fast, for example, it starts with the companies that have raised the most.
Find the right people at a target company
Kite searches a company's domain in Clearbit for the people who work there, filtered by job title, role, seniority, and location. Once Kite has its list of target accounts, it looks for the people your product serves. For that payroll software, it might search each restaurant group for its head of finance or its director of operations. Clearbit returns each person's name, title, and work email.
If you don't send outreach to people in the European Union, Kite can ask Clearbit to leave them out of the results. A stricter setting also leaves out people whose country Clearbit doesn't know.
Put the details to work
Kite scores each company and person from one to five against your ideal customer profile and writes a one-line reason, such as "Restaurant group in Texas, 420 employees, raised $25 million, finance lead found." Then it takes the results wherever your team needs them:
- Your CRM. Kite fills the empty company and contact fields in a connected CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce and adds the fit score and its reason. Fields your team already filled in keep their values.
- A spreadsheet. Kite saves the list to a connected Google Sheet, one row per company or person, with the Clearbit details and Kite's score.
- An email campaign. Kite writes a message for each person from its research on their company. Once you approve the campaign, it sends from your team's Kite address or a connected email product. Then it reports which messages were delivered, which failed, and who replied.
If trial signups and form fills keep arriving with gaps, Kite can run the same lookups on a schedule, such as every Monday morning, and send you a summary of each batch.
What Kite reads in Clearbit
Information Kite can read
- Company profilesA company's industry and sector, employee range, estimated revenue, funding raised, location, founding year, website technology, social profiles, and, for public companies, the ticker and market value. Kite uses these to judge whether an account fits.
- Domains for company namesThe website domain and logo that belong to a company's exact name. Kite uses these to look up companies on lists that have no domains.
- Person profilesA person's name, title, role, seniority, location, employer, and social profiles, found from their email address. Kite uses these to qualify inbound leads and write to them about their actual job.
- Company search resultsThe companies in Clearbit's database that match a search, sorted by size, funding, market value, or match quality. Kite uses these to find new target accounts.
- Contact search resultsThe people at a company who match a title, role, seniority, or location, with their work emails. Kite uses these to find the right person to contact at each account.
How Kite connects to Clearbit
Kite is your AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack.
Add an API key for your Clearbit account. Kite uses the access granted to that key. Clearbit isn't one of Kite's built-in sources, so you'll need your own account, and the lookups Kite runs count against your Clearbit plan. To have Kite write the details back to your records, connect the CRM or spreadsheet where those records live as well.
From there, start with the result you want, such as "Fill in the missing industry and employee counts on last quarter's trial signups in HubSpot and tell me which ones fit." Kite proposes which records to look up and where the results will go, and it starts once you confirm.
How-to guides using Clearbit
- How to fill in company details with Clearbit Kite works out the right domain for each record, looks up only the companies missing details, scores every account against your ideal customer profile, and writes the results back to your CRM or spreadsheet.
Where Clearbit fits in Kite's marketing work
Clearbit can supply both halves of a lead list when your team already pays for it. Its company search finds accounts that match your profile, and its contact search finds the people at each one. Kite decides who belongs on the list, scores each prospect, and adds the details your outreach needs.
Clearbit tells Kite who just filled in your form. From a work email, Kite learns the person's role and their company's size and industry. It judges how well the lead fits, records it in your CRM, and drafts a reply that suits the person's job.
Common questions
Is Clearbit the same as HubSpot Breeze Intelligence?
Clearbit's data now powers HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence. HubSpot bought Clearbit in 2023 and moved its data into HubSpot, where it fills in company and contact records under the Breeze Intelligence name. This page covers the Clearbit API, which Kite reaches with your Clearbit API key. If your team gets Clearbit's data through HubSpot instead, connect HubSpot, and Kite reads the filled-in company and contact fields from your HubSpot records.
Do I need Clearbit if Kite already has built-in data sources?
No. Kite fills in company and contact details with its built-in sources, which need no account of your own. Apollo supplies companies, people, and professional email addresses. Clay fills in a list from multiple providers in one pass, and Crustdata adds funding, hiring, and technology data. Connecting Clearbit makes sense when your team already pays for it, or when you want a second source for companies the built-in sources didn't cover.