Intent data has always promised greater relevance. But it’s only really achieved mildly improved targeting, until now.
There’s an important difference between ‘here is a list of companies that fit your profile’ (targeting), and ‘here is a company where something just changed, and now they might need what you sell’ (relevance). The first is a filter, but the second is the reason to pick up the phone.
HubSpot’s standard buyer intent has sat firmly in the first category. It tells you which companies visited your website. Useful only really as a proxy, because a website visit is not a buying signal it’s a possibility.
At the end of June 2026, HubSpot shipped something more intriguing. Custom intent signals, now in public beta, let you define the specific business moments that matter to you, in plain language, and HubSpot monitors for them across the web. When it finds a match, it returns the company, source, date, and the context.
It is the closest HubSpot has ever come to giving every rep the kind of research that good reps already do manually. Whether it works depends, as always, on what sits underneath it.
What custom intent signals are and how they differ from standard buyer intent
20 new pre-built news signals. Financial moves, leadership changes, corporate structure shifts, competitive activity. All filterable and usable in workflows.
Custom intent signals. You write a plain-language description of the moment you care about. HubSpot monitors for it and surfaces matching companies with cited sources.
The third one is the significant change. Standard buyer intent tracks website visits (first-party, via your tracking code) and research topics (across 200,000+ third-party websites). The pre-built news signals detect known event types like funding rounds, leadership hires, M&A. Custom signals let you go beyond all of that and define the event yourself.
As Alex Bauer, VP of Marketing at DemandWorks, put it after two months of early access: “It lets you define the moments that actually matter to your business.” His framing is useful: “Personalisation says ‘I know who you are.’ Relevance says ‘I know what you’re dealing with today.'”
Here is how the layers of HubSpot intent data now stack up:
A good signal describes a specific, observable event that would change how you sell to that company. The test is ‘if this signal fired, would a rep do something different?’ If not, it’s not a signal, just trivia.
Example signals worth building:
“Company posts a job listing for VP of ‘X’ or Head of ‘Y’.” A hire that means they are investing in the function you serve. This is a timing signal because they are building capability, which often precedes a technology decision.
“Company onboards [named integration partner].” If they are adopting a tool in your ecosystem, they are building the stack you complement. This is an intent signal that no website visit or research topic can give you.
“Company receives a new compliance requirement in [your regulated vertical].” In sectors like financial services, healthcare, or education, regulatory change creates infrastructure needs. A company facing a new requirement is a company with a problem and a deadline.
“Company starts running paid thought-leadership ads on LinkedIn.” This signals marketing budget, a content engine, and a go-to-market motion that is actively investing. Bauer flagged this one from his early access.
Signals that waste credits:
“Company is growing.” Too broad. Every company on your target list is trying to grow. This will fire constantly and tell you nothing you did not already know.
“Company mentions AI.” In 2026, this returns half the internet.
“Company is hiring.” Unless you specify the role and seniority, this is noise. A company hiring a junior content writer and a company hiring a CRO are in completely different situations.
The specificity is the feature. If you write a signal as vaguely as a Google search, you will get Google-quality results. Which is to say a lot of everything, and none of it prioritised.
How custom intent signals fit alongside smart properties and third-party intent
Custom intent signals detect the moment. Smart properties research the company. Standard buyer intent tracks website engagement. So despite the slightly confusing semantics they are complementary rather than competing.
The useful mental model:
Intent signals answer: “What just happened at this company?”
Smart properties answer: “What kind of company is this, and do they fit?”
Workflows answer: “What should we do about it?”
In practice, these chain together. A custom signal fires (company hires a VP of RevOps). A smart property enriches the company record with industry, tech stack, and ICP fit score. A workflow routes the record to the right rep with the signal, the enrichment, and a recommended action. The rep gets a timely notification that says something useful.
Versus third-party intent platforms (Bombora, 6sense, G2): These track research behaviour across thousands of publisher sites, giving you surge scores for topic-level intent. HubSpot’s research topic intent partially replicates this (across 200,000+ sites). Custom intent signals do something different in monitoring for specific events you define, not research patterns. They are not a replacement for category-level intent data, they’re a different kind of signal entirely.
If you are already running Bombora or 6sense, custom signals add a layer they do not cover which is the specific, observable business moments that are harder to detect from research behaviour alone.
The credit economics
Custom intent signals use HubSpot Credits from the same shared pool as every other AI feature in the platform. This matters because the cost is not visible in isolation. Rather, it compounds across features.
Buyer intent tracking costs 10 credits per company per month. That covers all signals for that company (website visits, research topics, news signals, and custom signals). This way you don’t pay per signal, you pay to track a particular company.
However that same credit pool also funds:
Smart properties (10 credits per record per fill)
Prospecting Agent (100 credits per month per contact)
Customer Agent (100 credits per conversation)
Breeze workflow actions (10 credits per action)
Your monthly allocation depends on your plan. Starter tier receives 500, Professional 3,000 and Enterprise 5,000. Additional credits come in at $10 per 1,000 and note that credits do not roll over. Consider carefully your spend if you are tracking 200 target accounts (2,000 credits/month) and running smart properties on new MQLs, and your sales team is using the Prospecting Agent, how much headroom you have. Do the maths across all features before you enable a new one. The credit pool is shared and the budget conversations need to be too.
What needs to be true in your CRM before custom intent signals deliver value
A defined target-account list. You need to know which companies to track. Buyer intent charges credits per company per month. If you do not have a named target-account list, you are paying to monitor companies at random. Start with your ICP, build a segment, and track that segment. Expand when you see value, not before.
Workflows ready to act. A signal is only useful if something happens when it fires. Build the workflow before you enable the signal. What happens when a custom signal fires? Who gets notified? Does it create a task? Does it trigger enrichment? If the answer is “it appears on a timeline nobody checks,” the signal is wasted.
Enrichment in place. The signal tells you something happened. You still need context on the company. Smart properties, a third-party enrichment tool, or even a well-maintained set of standard properties fills that gap. A signal without context is a notification without a next step.
Rep adoption planned. If reps do not know the signals exist, or do not trust them, the feature is shelfware. The advantage of custom signals is that each one comes with source, date, and context. Show reps the evidence behind the signal so they can verify before acting. Trust is built on transparency, and this feature provides it, if someone shows the team where to look.
Credit budget allocated across features. Decide how credits are split across buyer intent, smart properties, and AI agents before someone burns the monthly allocation. This is a team-level conversation, not a feature-level one.
If that list sounds like a lot of groundwork, it is. But it is the same groundwork that makes every other CRM feature deliver value. The pattern is always the same: the feature is ready, but the infrastructure underneath it might not be. That gap is the kind of CRM architecture work Fly does through its Flight Plan retainer: target-account strategy, workflow architecture, data models, and the governance that stops credits being wasted on features nobody is ready to use.
The opportunity, and the familiar risk
Custom intent signals are the most interesting addition to HubSpot’s buyer intent in a long time. They move beyond proxies (page views, email opens, research topics) toward the kind of specific, observable business moments that good reps have always researched manually.
The feature is new and is still in beta (at the time of publishing). The coverage is thin and the edge cases are unknown but the architecture is sound – define the moment, monitor for it, return it with evidence.
Whether the potential translates to value depends on the CRM underneath. As always, the foundation is still the hard part.
‘Under the Influence’
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