Hi @OAskarov ,
You’ve already diagnosed the core issue correctly. The short answer is: no, there’s no way to sync Google Contacts into HubSpot without duplicates if those contacts don’t have an email address. That’s not a Google limitation, it’s fundamental to how HubSpot works.
HubSpot’s contact identity is email-based. If a contact comes in without an email, HubSpot has no reliable way to know whether it’s the same person as another record that only has a phone number. As a result, any sync or import that includes contacts with empty email fields will almost always create new records. That behavior hasn’t changed and still holds true today.
Because of that, there are really only two safe patterns:
First, stop the Google Contacts sync entirely, clean the data offline, then re-import. Export all contacts, enrich or complete email addresses where possible, remove records that you don’t actually want in HubSpot, and then import using email as the unique identifier. This is the lowest-risk option and the one HubSpot themselves usually recommend.
Second, if phone-only contacts are genuinely important, keep them out of HubSpot until they have an email. HubSpot isn’t designed to function as a phone-first contact database, and forcing that use case almost always leads to clutter and cleanup work later.
One small mitigation you can apply going forward is to limit Google Contacts sync to only contacts that already have an email address, if the account setup allows that. It won’t fix what’s already in HubSpot, but it prevents the mess from growing.
Unfortunately there’s no magic dedupe rule or workflow that can solve this automatically. Your Excel cleanup approach is boring, but it’s still the most reliable way to restore order.
Hope that confirms you’re not missing a hidden setting.
