Clearbit Connect: What Happened to the Gmail Extension

Clearbit's changelog entry of 13 February 2025 names five products for discontinuation on 30 April 2025: the free Clearbit Platform, the Weekly Visitor Report, the TAM Calculator, the free Slack integration, and Clearbit Connect. Connect was the Gmail sidebar extension that let you find and verify a work address without leaving your inbox, and for a lot of sales teams it was the only Clearbit product they ever touched.

If you are searching for it now, this page explains what it was, what the announcement means in practice, what the search phrase usually means today, and what does the same job.

What Clearbit Connect was

Connect was a browser extension for Gmail. It put a panel beside the compose window where you could type a company domain, see the people Clearbit held records for, and drop a verified address straight into the To field. There was a free tier with a monthly lookup allowance, which is why it spread through sales teams faster than any paid Clearbit product.

The appeal was that it removed a context switch. Finding an address usually means leaving the inbox for a data tool, running a lookup, copying a string and coming back. Connect collapsed that into the window you were already in, and the friction it removed was larger than the feature list suggested.

How to Use Clearbit Connect in Gmail Today

You cannot, in its original form. Clearbit's own changelog named Clearbit Connect among the free tools discontinued on April 30, 2025, and a request for its Chrome Web Store listing today lands on a page whose address reads empty-title and whose text never mentions Clearbit. The same in-inbox lookup now comes from another vendor's Gmail extension, covered below.

What made it worth replacing was how little it asked of you. The whole job took three steps inside the compose window, and any replacement has to cover all three to replace the habit rather than just the data.

Gmail compose · Clearbit Connect sidebar

Type a company domain into the panel beside the compose window 1

See the people Clearbit held records for at that company 2

Drop a verified address straight into the To field 3

1. 1The lookup happened in the window you were already in, with no context switch.
2. 2A free tier with a monthly lookup allowance is why it spread through sales teams.
3. 3The address arrived verified, which a replacement extension should also show.

What happened to it

The vendor announced the retirement itself. The relevant sentence in the changelog reads that on 30 April 2025 the free Clearbit Platform, Weekly Visitor Report, Clearbit Connect, TAM Calculator and Clearbit free Slack integration will be discontinued. That announcement sits inside the wider story of HubSpot acquiring Clearbit. The same changelog entry points users to Breeze Intelligence, unveiled at INBOUND 2024, and HubSpot's help article of that name now redirects to one titled "Get started with data enrichment", which our page on Clearbit enrichment covers in full.

A related limitation worth weighing is that Clearbit itself no longer sells standalone, which is why this enrichment tool comparison weighs it against a standalone alternative.

A request for the extension's Chrome Web Store listing, at both the current store address and the older one carrying the same extension ID, does not return a listing. Both land on an address whose slug reads empty-title, the page served there is titled only Chrome Web Store and carries a noindex directive, and the word Clearbit does not appear anywhere in it. A failed request is not proof that a listing has been removed, and it should not be read as one. Combined with the vendor's own discontinuation notice, though, it is not an encouraging signal for anyone hoping to install it today.

Clearbit's remaining surfaces support the same reading. The homepage announces the HubSpot acquisition, clearbit.com/pricing now redirects to that homepage rather than serving a pricing table, and the only account link on it is a login for existing customers.

The full Clearbit changelog sequence, including the Logo API sunset that followed, is set out on our Clearbit enrichment page.

The other thing this search means

A meaningful share of searches for connecting Clearbit are not about the extension at all. They are people trying to wire Clearbit into something else: a CRM, a form, a customer data platform, a support tool. Clearbit's own help centre carries an article on connecting HubSpot to Clearbit, and integration directories carry connector listings for it.

The Clearbit vs Groove comparison explains why the two tools sit at different stages of a sales workflow rather than competing for the same job.

That version of the question now has a different answer too. Where the data has moved inside HubSpot, connecting Clearbit to HubSpot is no longer an integration you build. HubSpot's data enrichment help article lists the capability on Starter, Professional and Enterprise subscriptions and says data enrichment does not consume HubSpot Credits, so the question is which HubSpot edition you hold. For anything else you were planning to connect it to, the relevant surface is the API, and the current state of that is covered in our guide to the Clearbit API.

What actually replaces the in-inbox lookup

The job Connect did splits into two jobs that are worth pricing separately, because conflating them is how teams end up paying for a platform when they wanted a sidebar.

The one-off lookup

Low volume, high urgency

• You are writing to one person right now
• A browser extension or a single search is the right shape
• Free tiers usually cover the real volume
• Speed matters more than cost per lookup

The list build

High volume, planned

• Addresses for hundreds of rows at once
• An extension is the wrong tool at any price
• Cost per correct address is the metric
• A provider sequence beats any single lookup tool

For the one-off lookup, most of the established email-finding vendors ship a browser extension with a free monthly allowance, and the allowance is usually generous relative to how often a person genuinely needs an ad-hoc address. Hunter's pricing page, for example, lists a Free plan with 50 credits a month, shared across its email finder, email verifier and domain search, and we cover how its checks behave in our page on the Hunter email verifier.

For the list build, an extension is the wrong instrument regardless of which vendor makes it. A waterfall runs providers in order, stops at the first confident result, and only pays the next stage for the rows the previous stage could not resolve. The order we run today is GetLeads first, then Prospeo, then MillionVerifier brute-force, with every find verified before it is used, and the protocol for testing any provider against rows you already hold verified addresses for is in our guide to email finder tools.

If you want the field rather than a single replacement, our Clearbit alternatives roundup covers the category.

What an inbox lookup can and cannot tell you

Whichever extension you land on, the verdict it shows beside an address is narrower than it looks, and the gap matters more when you are about to send rather than when you are building a list you will check later.

A green tick means a mail server accepted the address. It does not mean the address belongs to the person whose name sits above it. Those two things come apart in two situations that are common on exactly the kind of lookup an inbox extension is used for.

The first is accept-all domains. A catch-all server accepts mail to every local part on the domain, so any address you invent on it verifies. An extension showing a positive verdict on a catch-all domain has told you about the server's configuration and nothing about whether a mailbox exists. Our position on those contacts is that the catch-all tail gets banked rather than guessed at.

The second is the right mailbox at the wrong surface. An address can be perfectly deliverable and still reach somebody at a company they left, or at a parent brand that does not run the division you are writing to. No verification step is capable of seeing that, by construction.

Neither point argues against using a lookup extension. Both argue for treating a verification verdict as a deliverability signal rather than an identity signal, and for checking identity separately when the message matters. A bounce that never happens is good news about the mail server and no news at all about whether the right person read it.

Choosing a replacement extension

Three questions separate the options faster than a feature comparison does.

What does the free tier actually meter? Some vendors meter searches, some meter verifications, and some price a verification at a fraction of a search. That difference decides whether a free allowance covers your real pattern of use, because looking up ten people to find one address consumes very differently under each model.

Does it charge for a miss? A lookup that returns nothing should cost nothing, and vendors vary on this. It is a small line in a pricing page and a large one in a monthly bill when your market is one the vendor covers poorly.

Where does the data go? An extension that quietly writes every address you look up into a shared workspace, or that syncs to a CRM by default, is making a decision about your data that belongs to you. Check it once at install rather than discovering it later.

Two things worth taking from this

A free tool inside a paid platform is the first thing cut. All five products in that changelog entry were free surfaces. Free tools are marketing, and marketing gets rationalised when a company is absorbed. If a free extension is doing real work in your process, that is worth knowing about before somebody else decides its fate.

An extension is a habit, not an integration. Connect's real value was that it lived where the work happened. When it went away, what broke was not a data pipeline but a set of muscle memories across a sales team, which is harder to notice and harder to replace. Anything that sits in a daily workflow deserves the same question you would ask of an API dependency: what happens to the work if this disappears next quarter.

The short version

Clearbit Connect was a free Gmail extension for finding and verifying work addresses without leaving the inbox. Clearbit's own changelog named it for discontinuation on 30 April 2025, alongside the free platform, the Weekly Visitor Report, the TAM Calculator and the free Slack integration. A direct request for its Chrome Web Store listing returns no listing, which is consistent with removal without proving it. The wider context is that HubSpot acquired Clearbit, and the nearest current equivalent is HubSpot's own data enrichment, which its help article places on Starter and higher subscriptions without consuming HubSpot Credits. For ad-hoc lookups, a competing vendor's extension and free allowance does the same job. For list building, an extension was never the right tool, and a sequence of providers is.

If you would rather see the whole motion running on your own ICP without assembling a data stack first, start a free campaign and we will build the list, the copy and the sending infrastructure around it.

Pricing and features are taken from the vendors' own pages. Verify current terms with the vendor before relying on them.