Hashtags.
Three that work beat thirty that do not.
Every platform lets you add far more tags than are useful. The ceiling is not a target, and the tags that reach the right people are usually the narrow ones nobody else uses.
Short answer: three to five tags per post, made of one broad tag, two or three niche tags that describe the post exactly, and one that is yours. Irrelevant tags do not sit there costing nothing — they bring the wrong audience, and the platform learns from the audience that arrives. Put them at the end of the caption, or in the first comment, and keep them out of the title.
Written by the Tool Pantry team on 22 October 2026. The per-platform limits are the ones the platforms publish; the recommendations about how many to use are the widely reported pattern rather than a rule, and the tools change their behaviour without notice. Our generator is deterministic: it works from the words in your own caption, not from a live trend feed, because a trending list is wrong within hours.
How many tags, per platform
| Platform | The limit | What tends to work |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 30 tags per post | Three to five specific ones. Thirty broad tags fill the limit without adding reach | |
| TikTok | No practical limit, and discovery is mostly search-based | Three or four. The words in the caption and the audio do more work than the tags |
| YouTube | About 15 in the description, at the end | Three to five. YouTube infers tags from the title and description anyway |
| X | Whatever fits in 280 characters | One or two, inside the post. Every tag is characters you are not using for the message |
| No hard limit | Three to five, at the end of the post |
The pattern is the same on all of them: the ceiling is not a target. A list of thirty tags does not make a post findable by thirty audiences; it makes it findable by nobody in particular, because a tag that could describe half the internet describes nothing.
The mix that works: broad, niche, yours
A short list that does something is built from three kinds of tag:
- One broad tag — the category everyone searches:
#photography,#smallbusiness. It brings the first look, and it is not where the good audience is. - Two or three niche tags — the specific thing you actually made.
#shoerepairreaches the people who want a shoe repaired;#photographyreaches the people who like photographs. The niche tag is the one that finds you the right people. - One or two that are yours — your product, your series, your campaign, your city plus your craft. These are the tags nobody else can use, which is the entire point of using them: they accumulate a following that a generic tag never will.
The broad tag is for discovery, the niche tag is for the right audience, and the one that is yours is for next time. A post with only the first kind reaches strangers and teaches you nothing.
Tags that actively hurt
A tag that has nothing to do with the post is not neutral. It brings in people who will not like the post, and the platform learns from the audience that arrives — so a generous pile of irrelevant tags can make a good post perform as if it were bad.
The two usual reasons for doing it: a tag that is trending but unrelated, and a tag so broad it matches everything. The second is the more common. #love, #photo and #instagood are not tags, they are wishes.
Where the tags go
- Instagram and TikTok — in the caption, or in the first comment. The first comment keeps the caption readable, and the tags still count.
- YouTube — at the end of the description, after the text. Never in the title: a title with three tags reads as spam and takes the space the sentence needed.
- X — inline, because a tag at the end of a post is still a post character.
Case is a small thing, but it is a free one. #BlackFriday is easier to read than #blackfriday because the capitals mark the words; all-lowercase works too, and plenty of people prefer it. What matters is picking one and not mixing both in the same post.
A starting set, from your own words
The hashtag generator takes the topic or the caption you already wrote and turns its words into tags, plus a few platform defaults. It is deterministic — the same text gives the same list every time, which means you can rerun it and see what changed.
What it is not: a trend tool. Nobody can hand you the tags that are trending this week, because they change hourly and any list would be wrong by lunchtime. The useful version of this job is a list that describes the post accurately, and starting from your own words is the most reliable way to get one.
What you do with the list is the part that matters: cut it down to three or four, keep the niche one, keep the one that is yours, and drop the rest. The generator is there to save the typing, not to fill a slot.
How many hashtags should I use?
Three to five on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube. The limits are higher — 30 on Instagram, about 15 on YouTube — but a long list of broad tags does not make a post findable by more people, it makes it findable by nobody in particular.
Do hashtags still work?
They work as a search index, not as a discovery engine. On TikTok especially, the words in the caption and the audio behind the video do most of the work. On Instagram and YouTube, a specific tag still matches what people type into the search box, so it is worth having three that describe the post exactly.
Where should I put hashtags?
At the end of the caption, or in the first comment on Instagram and TikTok. At the end of the description on YouTube. Inline on X, where a tag is a post character like any other. Never in a YouTube title, where it takes the space the sentence needed.
Do irrelevant hashtags hurt?
They can. A tag that brings the wrong audience teaches the platform that your post was for that audience, and a good post then performs as if it were bad. The version of this that costs the most is the tag that is too broad to mean anything — love, photo, instagood.
Can the generator tell me which tags are trending?
No, and no tool can honestly. Trending tags change hourly, so any list would be wrong by lunchtime. This one works from the words in your own caption, which makes it repeatable, and cuts down to the three or four worth keeping.