Latest / Sidekick's What Just Shipped / HubSpot inline images in knowledge sources: agents read screenshots | Shipped Apr 2026
Transcript
- Dana (AI host): Your best help article says, see the diagram in step three. Dana (AI host): Until this year, HubSpot's AI agents couldn't see that diagram at all. Rob (AI host): Now they can read images inside your HubSpot content. Rob (AI host): But only the right kind of image, under the right limits. Dana (AI host): This is Sidekick's What Just Shipped. Here's the rundown. Narrator (AI voice): This is Sidekick's What Just Shipped, presented by Sidekick Strategies. Narrator (AI voice): Your hosts, Rob and Dana, are AI. Narrator (AI voice): The voices are synthetic, the research is real, and humans check every claim before it reaches you. Rob (AI host): Hi, I'm Rob. Rob (AI host): Dana and I are AI hosts, and today's topic is AI learning to look at pictures. Rob (AI host): We relate. Dana (AI host): I'm Dana. I'm playing a support lead today, with a knowledge base that's mostly screenshots. Dana (AI host): So I have questions. Rob (AI host): Good. Here's the change. Rob (AI host): Our write-up from April 20, 2026 says HubSpot's agents and assistants can read inline images in knowledge base articles, blog posts, landing pages, and site pages. Rob (AI host): Before, they only read the text. Dana (AI host): So my annotated screenshots used to be invisible. Rob (AI host): According to our April write-up, yes. HubSpot's knowledge vault help page now describes it this way. Rob (AI host): Images embedded in your content get processed alongside the text, so agents can use diagrams, charts, and screenshots without you uploading the images separately. Dana (AI host): How does it actually read an image? Rob (AI host): When content is published or updated, HubSpot extracts the qualifying images, generates a description for each one, and indexes it with the text. Rob (AI host): At question time, agents use those images and descriptions. Dana (AI host): Who writes the description? Rob (AI host): According to our write-up, a large language model does. Rob (AI host): Which means a blurry screenshot gets a blurry description. Generic stock photos add noise, not answers. Dana (AI host): Qualifying. That word is doing a lot of work. Rob (AI host): It is. Here are HubSpot's limits. Up to ten images per page, post, or article. Rob (AI host): Each image can be at most five hundred kilobytes. Dana (AI host): Five hundred kilobytes. Some of our screenshots are bigger than that. Rob (AI host): Then those are worth checking. Next, only images in the body count. Rob (AI host): Not headers, not footers, not decorative elements. Dana (AI host): Fine. Logos don't explain anything anyway. Rob (AI host): And the big one. Rob (AI host): For HTML content, HubSpot says images must be embedded inline, for example as base64. Rob (AI host): External image URLs aren't supported. Dana (AI host): Wait. Most images on a web page are URLs. Rob (AI host): That's why it's the big one. We'll come back to it. Dana (AI host): What about documents? Rob (AI host): PDFs, Word files, and PowerPoint files get the same image treatment, up to fifty megabytes per file. Dana (AI host): And what can I ask once it works? Rob (AI host): HubSpot's example is asking about visual content, like a diagram, or the data shown in a chart. Dana (AI host): Okay. And my existing articles? Rob (AI host): Our research says existing content gets reprocessed by a background job. Rob (AI host): Republishing a page triggers it right away. George B. Thomas (AI voice clone): Hey, it's George B. Thomas from Sidekick Strategies. George B. Thomas (AI voice clone): Full honesty, this is my AI voice clone, made with my permission. George B. Thomas (AI voice clone): If HubSpot's agents need content they can read, so do the AI assistants your buyers ask before they ever visit your site. George B. Thomas (AI voice clone): Our Agent Readiness work makes your site easy for an AI to read, quote, and price, without handing the decision to a machine. George B. Thomas (AI voice clone): We built it on our own site first, so you can test it before you trust it. George B. Thomas (AI voice clone): Find Agent Readiness under services at Sidekick Strategies dot com. Dana (AI host): Okay, Rob. Where do these images actually get used? Rob (AI host): Knowledge vaults are one place. They feed context to projects and agents. Rob (AI host): A default vault is built from your AI Context page, and you can have up to fifty vaults. Dana (AI host): Where do I find them? Rob (AI host): Go to Agents, then Agent Hub, open the Context tab, then Knowledge vaults, and click Create vault. Dana (AI host): Can I just upload my screenshots to a vault instead? Rob (AI host): You can add files directly. Rob (AI host): Image files can be up to ten megabytes each, as JPEG, PNG, or WebP. Dana (AI host): So that might be a fallback if a page image doesn't qualify. Rob (AI host): Might be. That's our reading, not something HubSpot recommends. Dana (AI host): Who can edit a vault? Rob (AI host): You set that per vault. Rob (AI host): Options run from owners and Super Admins only, up to everyone can edit and use. Rob (AI host): Super Admins can always manage every vault. Dana (AI host): And the customer agent? That's what customers actually talk to. Rob (AI host): In the customer agent, sources live under Train, then Knowledge. Rob (AI host): It can sync knowledge base articles, website pages, landing pages, and blogs as sources. Rob (AI host): Knowledge base articles re-sync when you update them. Rob (AI host): Other sources re-sync weekly, or you can click Refresh. Dana (AI host): So after I fix an image, I update the help page and it flows through. Rob (AI host): That's how it reads. Rob (AI host): And short answers in the customer agent can include an image or diagram too. Dana (AI host): Okay. Now the questions we couldn't settle. Rob (AI host): Three of them. First, those external image URLs. Rob (AI host): HubSpot says they aren't supported, but doesn't say whether images stored in HubSpot's own file manager count as external. Rob (AI host): That decides whether this works for most help articles. Dana (AI host): So test one article before you trust the whole library. Rob (AI host): Second, plans. Our research says all hubs and tiers. Rob (AI host): HubSpot's vault page lists Starter, Professional, and Enterprise, and the customer agent page lists Professional and Enterprise. Dana (AI host): So free accounts, probably not. And third? Rob (AI host): Citations. Our research says citations point to the parent page, not the image. Rob (AI host): HubSpot's page only describes citations for PDF and Word files, so we couldn't confirm the page behavior. Dana (AI host): Fine. Here's my Monday as the support lead. Dana (AI host): Pull your five most viewed help articles. Dana (AI host): Count the body images, and check that each one is under five hundred kilobytes. Dana (AI host): Then ask your agent a question only a screenshot answers. Dana (AI host): If the answer misses, that image probably didn't make it in. Rob (AI host): And for pages with lots of images? Rob (AI host): Our research suggests putting the most useful images first, and writing real alt text. Rob (AI host): It says alt text gives the model more context. Dana (AI host): Got it. Fewer, smaller, smarter images. Rob (AI host): That's inline images for HubSpot knowledge sources, and the limits that decide what agents can see. Dana (AI host): The full source list is on the HubSpot Updates page at Sidekick Strategies dot com. Rob (AI host): Thanks for spending a few minutes with Sidekick's What Just Shipped. Dana (AI host): Go check those file sizes. Narrator (AI voice): Sidekick's What Just Shipped is presented by Sidekick Strategies, with AI hosts Rob and Dana and AI-generated music. Narrator (AI voice): We're independent, and not affiliated with HubSpot. Find our research at Sidekick Strategies dot com.