Hashtags or keywords: what actually gets you found now

The advice on hashtags has swung from “use thirty” to “they do nothing” and neither extreme was ever true. What actually happened is more interesting and more useful: both platforms got good at reading, and once a platform can read, a tag is a much weaker signal than a sentence.

What changed

Three things, over roughly three years.

1. Automatic transcription. TikTok transcribes the audio in your video and can index it. What you say out loud is now searchable text.
2. On-screen text recognition. Words you burn into the frame are read too.
3. Caption indexing. Both platforms treat the caption as descriptive text rather than as a place you put tags, and Instagram’s head has said publicly that hashtags do not particularly increase visibility.

Meanwhile search inside both apps grew enormously as a source of views, particularly on TikTok, where a substantial and growing share of usage is people typing a query rather than scrolling a feed. That is the shift that matters. Feed discovery rewards the first two seconds. Search discovery rewards being about something in words a person would type.

So do hashtags still do anything?

Yes, two things, and it is worth being precise about them because “hashtags are dead” costs people reach.

Classification

They help the system place a video into a topic quickly, which matters most on a new account or a new subject where there is not much else to go on.

Browsable surfaces

People do still tap through hashtags, particularly niche community ones. It is a small source of traffic, and for tight communities it is not nothing.

What they no longer do is amplify. Adding #viral #fyp #explore to a video does not put it in front of more people; those tags are attached to so many billions of posts that they carry no information about what your video is.

How many, and which

The current consensus, and it is fairly consistent across sources: three to five, all specific, all actually describing the video.

• One that names the broad topic: what field this belongs to.
• Two that name the specific subject: what this particular video is about.
• One or two community tags if your niche has them, the ones people in that world actually browse.
• Zero generic amplification tags. None. They are pure noise.

What to do instead: write for the search box

The replacement for hashtag strategy is boringly simple. Say what the video is about, in the words somebody would type, in three places.

1. Out loud, in the first few seconds

This is the one people miss entirely. If your video is about cutting dovetails by hand, the phrase “cutting dovetails by hand” should be spoken in the video, ideally early. The transcript is indexed, and a video that never says its own subject aloud is a video that is hard to match to a query.

2. On screen, as text

The hook text you should already be adding for silent viewers does double duty here. Make it descriptive rather than merely intriguing where you can, and you have satisfied both jobs with one line.

3. In the caption, as a sentence

Not keywords stuffed together: a sentence a person would recognise. The first line matters most, because it is what is visible before “more”.

Finding the words people actually use

Free, and it takes ten minutes a month.

1. Open TikTok search, type the first two or three words of a question in your niche, and read the autocomplete list. That is real query data in real phrasing.
2. Do the same on Instagram and on YouTube. The three lists overlap but not completely.
3. Watch a video in your niche and read the “Others searched for” suggestions TikTok shows on the search results page.
4. Read your own comments. The words your audience uses for things are frequently not the words you use, and theirs are the ones being typed.
5. Write down twenty phrases. That is a content calendar and a caption template in one.

Search traffic behaves completely differently

Worth knowing because it changes how you judge a video. Feed traffic arrives in the first 48 hours and then stops. Search traffic starts slowly and keeps going, sometimes for a year.

Which means a video that did 900 views in its first week and 14,000 over six months is a better video than one that did 8,000 in two days and stopped, even though the first one felt like a flop at the time. If you are making explanatory content, check your older posts occasionally. Some of them are still working.

Viral Pop generates the hashtags for a specific video rather than a block to reuse, and writes the caption to carry the search terms. But everything on this page works with no tool at all: say the subject out loud, put it on screen, write one true sentence, and use four honest tags.