Because emails are sent to known contacts, you can't use smart content categories based on anonymous information like device type or referral source. This fundamental restriction hints at a bigger issue that many B2B marketers discover too late: HubSpot Smart Content has significant blind spots that can undermine your personalization strategy.
Smart content seems like the perfect solution for website personalization. You set up rules, create variations, and watch as different visitors see tailored experiences. But when you dig deeper, the limitations become impossible to ignore.
The Anonymous Visitor Problem
The most critical limitation of HubSpot Smart Content is its inability to personalize for the majority of your traffic. In order to personalize content based on firmographics, a visitor needs to have already submitted their contact info through a form on your site. 98% of your traffic are unknown visitors.
Think about that for a moment. Your most important personalization use cases—showing industry-specific messaging, displaying relevant case studies, or tailoring your value proposition—only work for the 2% of visitors who've already converted. Hubspot Smart Content fails to provide the best personalized website experience by not identifying anonymous companies on the site.
For B2B companies, this creates a catch-22. You need personalization to drive initial conversions, but HubSpot's smart content only kicks in after someone has already filled out a form. The visitors who need personalization the most—those early in their journey—see generic content instead.
Cookie Dependency and Privacy Limitations
HubSpot uses cookies to track visitor behavior. As privacy regulations tighten and cookie policies evolve, businesses face limitations in tracking users. Visitors who decline cookies miss out on the full benefits of smart content, making it harder to collect accurate data.
The reliance on cookies means your personalization strategy is increasingly vulnerable. If a visitor has cookies blocked by their web browser or network security policies, they won't be shown a smart variation. With browsers phasing out third-party cookies and users becoming more privacy-conscious, the effectiveness of cookie-based personalization continues to decline.
SEO Complications You Can't Ignore
Google has difficulty interpreting smart content, which can limit your page's SEO benefits. This creates a real dilemma for marketing teams. Do you optimize for search engines or personalize for users? With HubSpot Smart Content, you're forced to choose.
Using smart content in a blog post isn't best practice, as each blog post should answer one specific question for one particular audience. Smart content on your blog may be misleading to RSS readers and may harm your SEO. The platform's own documentation acknowledges these limitations, yet many marketers only discover them after implementation.
Thank You Page Timing Issues
Here's a specific scenario that catches teams off guard: Smart content shouldn't be used on a thank you page. When a visitor submits a form and is redirected to a thank you page, there isn't enough time for HubSpot to determine if the contact meets the smart content rules on the thank you page.
This timing limitation means you can't personalize one of your most valuable pages. Thank you pages are prime opportunities for next-step CTAs, relevant content offers, or account-specific messaging. But with HubSpot Smart Content, these pages remain stubbornly generic.
The Default Content Dilemma
You need a default version for the smart rules. This requirement creates a particularly frustrating scenario for complex personalization strategies. As the email Smart rules do not currently allow to hide the default content if the user is not on the list, we have several categories in our service portal and each would need its content and list in the newsletter. Each of the users can be part of any of the categories (list). Now we'd need to create 10 smart content blocks and 10 CTA's in the newsletter and that would mean some users would see 9 empty content blocks & CTAs.
This means visitors who don't match any of your smart rules see default content—which often doesn't apply to them at all. For sophisticated personalization strategies with multiple audience segments, this leads to cluttered, confusing experiences.
Limited Rule Complexity
There's a limit of 256 smart rules per module. While this might sound like plenty, it becomes constraining quickly when you're personalizing for multiple industries, company sizes, lifecycle stages, and geographic regions.
You're also restricted to using one smart rule type per module. A visitor might be segmented as an enterprise customer from USA starting from pricing page. If you're using Hubspot for personalization, you can use only one smart type. This forces you to choose between personalizing by industry OR company size OR lifecycle stage—you can't layer multiple criteria together effectively.
The Data Quality Dependency
Smart content depends on accurate segmentation. Incomplete or poorly managed contact data makes tracking and optimizing smart content difficult. Keeping your CRM up-to-date and well-organized is essential for leveraging HubSpot's tracking tools to their full potential.
Your personalization is only as good as your data. Before you dive in, first check if your CRM has clean data. This is critical for criteria such as targeting smart content using contact lifecycle stage or list membership. If your data is a mess, you risk mistakenly triggering "personalized" content for users that it doesn't apply to. This creates a significant operational burden and introduces risk of delivering wrong, irrelevant experiences.
A/B Testing Complications
While combining smart content with A/B testing might sound like a good idea, Mike cautions against it. The goal of A/B testing an email or call-to-action is to see which resonates best with your audience. Like any experiment, involving too many variables (think: smart content + A/B variations) will complicate the conclusion you're trying to reach.
You have to choose between testing and personalization. Rather than using smart content in your A/B tests, it's best to A/B test your content first, then personalize the winning content with smart modules. This sequential approach slows down optimization and makes it harder to test personalized variations against each other.
Technical Implementation Challenges
We've got 3 unique and different issues with Hubspot's Smart Content. After two months of wrestling with these issues, we are advising clients against using Hubspot's Smart Content until they fix the issues. Real-world implementation reveals problems that don't show up in demos or documentation.
One particularly troubling issue: We've had issues where the smart subject line was out of sync with the corresponding smart body content. The only way we discovered this was by looking at contact timelines on a lead-by-lead basis. These subtle bugs can undermine your entire campaign without you realizing it.
What This Means for Your Personalization Strategy
Now, the ability to do Smart Content won't automatically improve your site. Your success depends on your strategy and planning—putting in the hard work to truly understand your customer and figure out where the right personalization breakpoints should be. You have to gracefully tiptoe the fine line between too generic and Rube Goldberg.
The reality is that HubSpot Smart Content works well for basic personalization scenarios—returning visitors, known contacts in different lifecycle stages, or simple geographic targeting. But for the sophisticated, account-based personalization that drives real B2B results, the limitations become dealbreakers.
Modern B2B personalization requires identifying anonymous companies, layering multiple data points, and delivering relevant experiences from the very first visit. If 98% of your traffic consists of anonymous visitors, you need a solution built specifically for that use case—not one that treats anonymous personalization as an afterthought.
The question isn't whether HubSpot Smart Content has limitations. It's whether those limitations align with what you're trying to achieve. For many B2B companies focused on account-based strategies, the answer is increasingly clear: you need specialized website personalization tools that can identify and personalize for anonymous visitors from day one.