YouTube Hashtags: The 60-Tag Rule and the Three Above Your Title

YouTube's hashtag rules are some of the oldest and most clearly documented of any platform. They also include one rule that catches people out: go over the limit and you lose every tag on the video, not just the extras. Here is how hashtags work on YouTube, and how many it makes sense to use.

Where can you add hashtags on YouTube?

You can add hashtags in a video's title and in its description, and YouTube turns each one into a link to a results page.

YouTube's help center says hashtags can be added when you upload a video, record a Short or create a YouTube Music playlist. Click a hashtag and you see other content using it. Hashtags in the title are part of the title, so they take space from the words people read first; most channels put them in the description instead.

What is YouTube's hashtag limit?

If a video or playlist has more than 60 hashtags, YouTube ignores every hashtag on it.

This is the rule to remember. It is not a soft penalty on the extras. Publish 61 and none of them work. There is no reason to get close: a description with dozens of hashtags is hard to read, and most of them would not describe the video well anyway.

Paste a description into the hashtag counter to check the count, and the 5,000-character description limit, in one go.

Which hashtags appear above the title?

Up to three hashtags from the description can appear by the video title, chosen by YouTube as the most engaging ones.

The help page says YouTube shows the hashtags it considers most engaging, so you do not have full control over which three appear. You can improve the odds by using only a few, all of them closely related to the video. If your description has three hashtags, those are the only candidates.

What does YouTube say about misleading hashtags?

YouTube says not to add hashtags that are not directly related to the video, and unrelated or misleading tags can lead to the content being removed.

YouTube's hashtag policies also rule out over-tagging and tags that are offensive or that harass. In practice: describe the video. A cooking video tagged with the name of an unrelated trending show is misleading, and it is exactly what the rule targets.

How are hashtags different from tags in YouTube Studio?

Hashtags are visible and clickable; the tags field in YouTube Studio is hidden from viewers and matters little for discovery.

People mix these up all the time. The Studio tags field is metadata. YouTube's own help says tags play a minimal role in discovery and are mostly useful for words people often misspell. Hashtags, by contrast, are part of what the viewer sees and can click.

How should YouTube hashtags be written?

Write them without spaces, in CamelCase for multi-word tags, and keep them short.

YouTube's help page notes that hashtags do not contain spaces, so two words need to be joined, and gives both #TwoWords and #twowords as examples. CamelCase is the better choice: viewers can read it at a glance and screen readers can announce the separate words. Long tags crowded into the space by the title also get cut off on small screens.

How many hashtags should a YouTube video have?

Three to five relevant hashtags is a sensible default; it keeps the description clean and gives YouTube clear candidates for the three by the title.

A simple pattern for a long-form video:

1. One tag for the subject, such as #HomeBaking.
2. One for the specific topic, such as #SourdoughBread.
3. One for your series or channel, such as #WeekendBakes.

For a Short, the same three-tag pattern works. When you type a # in a Short's text, YouTube suggests hashtags based on your past uploads, which can help you stay consistent across a series. Keep reusable sets in the hashtag set builder.