How many hashtags should I use?

Enough to describe the post accurately, which in practice is usually a handful. There is no evidence that filling the maximum helps, and it costs you caption readability.

In the caption or the first comment?

It makes little practical difference to distribution. Putting them in a comment keeps the caption readable, which is the actual argument for it.

Do banned or restricted tags hurt my post?

Using a tag a platform has restricted can limit a post's distribution. It is worth checking any tag you use repeatedly, rather than checking all of them once.

What hashtags actually do now

They stopped being a distribution channel and became a labelling system. That changes what they are for, and how many you need.

Last reviewed 31 August 2026

What changed

Hashtags were originally a way for people to browse a topic, and adding them put your post into a feed strangers were reading. That is much less true now. Discovery on every large platform is driven by recommendation systems that read the content itself — the audio, the visuals, the caption text, and above all how people respond to it.

So hashtags moved from being distribution to being one classification signal among many. They help a system work out what your post is about; they do not, on their own, put it in front of anyone.

What follows from that

Thirty hashtags is not five times better than six. Once the system has classified the post, more tags add nothing, and a wall of them makes the caption worse for the humans who do read it.
Enormous tags are pointless. A tag with tens of millions of posts is not a category, it is a wall — nobody browses it and it tells a classifier nothing specific.
Specific and mid-sized is where they still earn their place. A tag that describes a real niche both classifies accurately and has a browsable feed with people actually in it.
Irrelevant popular tags actively hurt. They teach the system to show your post to people who did not want it, and their non-response is the signal that suppresses your next one.
A copy-pasted block used on every post describes none of them. If the same thirty tags fit all your content, they are not describing anything.

Where they still work well

Two places. First, genuinely niche communities that still browse a tag — hobby, trade and local scenes where the tag functions as a room rather than a category. Second, your own branded tag, which is useful for collecting user content and for people who want to find everything you have posted on a theme.

Neither of those is a growth strategy. Both are worth doing because they cost almost nothing.

Questions

How many hashtags should I use?: Enough to describe the post accurately, which in practice is usually a handful. There is no evidence that filling the maximum helps, and it costs you caption readability.
In the caption or the first comment?: It makes little practical difference to distribution. Putting them in a comment keeps the caption readable, which is the actual argument for it.
Do banned or restricted tags hurt my post?: Using a tag a platform has restricted can limit a post's distribution. It is worth checking any tag you use repeatedly, rather than checking all of them once.