August 4, 2026. HubSpot told customers that Contact Discovery, a tool for finding and adding net new contacts without leaving the CRM, would launch today. Five weeks later the plan sits in an unusual state. The launch date is still published, the legal terms written to support it were withdrawn on July 5, and no replacement date has been announced. Meanwhile HubSpot's own documentation, updated after that withdrawal, contains the detail that actually matters to anyone running outbound from a HubSpot portal: which enrichment mode you are in decides whether your contacts feed a dataset other companies draw from.
What HubSpot published, and what it took back
- June 25, 2026. A post in HubSpot's Legal Updates forum, published under the handle adamcuzzort and titled July 1, 2026, Contact Discovery is Coming Soon + Legal Update, stated it plainly: "On August 4, Contact Discovery launches." It also told super admins that "starting August 4" they would manage the feature under Settings, then Data Management, then Data Enrichment. That post is still live and still carries the date.
- The data in scope was narrow and specific. HubSpot described "the kind of information you'd find on a business card: name, job title, company, work email, employer", plus email engagement signals from its own delivery infrastructure used only to confirm whether an address is live and reachable. Notes, deals, call recordings and custom fields were explicitly out of scope, and HubSpot wrote that this data "never leaves your portal".
- July 1, 2026. Updated terms took effect across the General Terms, Product Specific Terms, Data Processing Agreement, Sub-Processors Page, Anti-Spam Policy and Privacy Policy. Three new sub-processors were added: Baseten Labs, Bright Data and Exa Labs. A new Privacy Policy section disclosed Email Engagement Data, covering opens, clicks, bounces and delivery status collected through tracking technologies embedded in emails sent from the platform. The Anti-Spam Policy gained a new SMS specific section requiring sender identification and honoured opt out commands.
- July 5, 2026. HubSpot reversed. In a community post titled "We Got This Wrong. And We Are Fixing It", chief product and technology officer Duncan Lennox wrote: "We will not move forward with the terms of service changes we communicated on July 1, 2026." He committed that any future enrichment capability built on customer data would be "fully and transparently opt-in". Independent trade coverage from PPC Land and MarTech put the elapsed time at four days.
- No new date was set. The reversal addressed the terms and the trust failure without restating a product timeline, and as of this writing there is no Contact Discovery article in HubSpot's knowledge base.
The setting that decides whether you contribute
Most commentary since July has told HubSpot customers to turn enrichment off. HubSpot's own documentation says something more precise, and more useful. The knowledge base article Get started with data enrichment, last updated July 10, 2026, five days after the reversal, describes the contribution mechanic like this: when you enrich a record and HubSpot can verify it "against multiple data points across our commercial dataset or public and third-party sources", then "limited business contact data from that enrichment may also be contributed back to the commercial dataset".
The sentence that follows is the one to read twice. "If you're only using continuous enrichment, no data is added to HubSpot's commercial dataset." Continuous enrichment, in HubSpot's settings, means updating records that were already enriched, monthly, when new data becomes available. So the line is not drawn between enrichment on and enrichment off. It is drawn between submitting records for enrichment, which can contribute, and refreshing records you already enriched, which HubSpot says does not.
Two further details from the same page are worth recording. Automatic enrichment is off by default for both contacts and companies and requires a deliberate customer action to switch on, so a portal nobody has touched is not contributing. And the identifiers HubSpot says it collects and saves are limited: first name, last name and business email address for contact enrichment, company domain for company enrichment, and nothing at all from form shortening.
Turning it off is not a single switch
If you decide to stop entirely, HubSpot's documentation describes three separate actions, not one. Turn off the automatic and continuous enrichment settings. Turn off Data enrichment access permissions for every user who should not enrich. And note that super admins can continue to manually enrich individual records regardless, so a complete stop means agreeing internally that they will not.
Two consequences are easy to miss. Turning enrichment off stops future activity but does not remove information already written into your CRM, so anything already enriched stays. And enrichment opt outs by individuals arrive as a separate workflow: HubSpot labels the contact with an enrichment opt out property, notifies super admins by email, and lets you action the deletion request manually or automatically. Contacts in the EU are told by email when they enter the commercial dataset, which means some of your prospects learn about this before your admin does.
What it means for operators
The useful action today is not to panic and not to ignore it. It is to open Settings, then Data Management, then Data Enrichment, and record what you find with a date, even if you change nothing. A dated screenshot of your enrichment configuration during the weeks the terms were in flux is worth more later than an argument from memory.
Beyond that, three things follow. First, your enrichment mode is now a data provenance question, and buyers who care about how you sourced their details are increasingly entitled to ask it, so anyone running lead generation at volume should be able to answer in one sentence. Second, the deliverability signal runs both ways: HubSpot uses sending outcomes from its own infrastructure to score whether an address is reachable, which is another reason list hygiene in cold email is an asset rather than a chore. Third, if you administer client portals, enabling enrichment was a decision you took on someone else's behalf, and it should be written down and confirmed rather than assumed.
There is also a procurement lesson that outlasts this incident. A vendor published a launch date, shipped terms to support it, and pulled them four days later after customers asked six specific questions. That is a healthy outcome and a warning at once. Alongside the deprecation notice question that belongs in every renewal conversation, add this one: how much notice do you give before changing terms that govern where our data flows?
What we are not asserting
We cannot see inside anyone's portal, so we are not claiming Contact Discovery did or did not appear for customers today. What is checkable from outside is what is published: the August 4 launch date still stands in HubSpot's June 25 post, the terms written to support it were withdrawn on July 5, and no revised date has been announced. If HubSpot relaunches on the fully opt in basis it promised, the distinction between contributing and refreshing is the part that will still decide what happens to your contacts.
Frequently Asked Questions
HubSpot published August 4 as the launch date in its June 25, 2026 community post, and that post is still live. The terms of service changes written to support the feature were withdrawn on July 5, 2026, and HubSpot has not published a revised date or a Contact Discovery knowledge base article. Check your own portal under Settings, Data Management, Data Enrichment rather than relying on secondary reports.
It stops future contribution through those settings. HubSpot's documentation also says that turning enrichment off does not remove information already added to your CRM, that super admins can still manually enrich individual records, and that you should turn off Data enrichment access permissions for other users as well if you want to stop completely.
Automatic enrichment fills in records as they arrive in your CRM. Continuous enrichment updates records that were already enriched, monthly, when new data becomes available. HubSpot's documentation states that if you are only using continuous enrichment, no data is added to its commercial dataset.
Business card level details, which HubSpot listed as name, job title, company, work email and employer, plus email engagement signals from HubSpot's own delivery infrastructure used to confirm whether an address is live. HubSpot said notes, deals, call recordings and custom fields were out of scope and never leave your portal.
HubSpot publishes a privacy preferences form for opting out of its commercial dataset and a separate privacy request form for access and deletion. When someone opts out, HubSpot deletes their enrichment data, notifies accounts that previously received it, labels the CRM contact with an enrichment opt out property, and notifies super admins.
Treat the enrichment configuration as a decision made on the client's behalf. Record the current state with a date, confirm the client has its own legal basis before enabling anything new, and route compliance questions to their legal team, which is what HubSpot's own documentation advises.