Are Tags Important on YouTube in 2025?

Figuring out if tags matter on YouTube anymore is harder than it sounds.

Clicking on the top links on Google will yield a lot of conflicting opinions and advice on the subject — from whispers of the continued power of tags, to claims that tags do absolutely nothing these days.

“To tag, or not to tag, that is the question.”
- Shakespeare probably, if he were a YouTuber

So what’s the real answer?

Let’s cut through the haze of the heated debate and dive into the cold hard facts & data to see if we can finally answer once and for all…

🤔Are YouTube tags important?

In a hurry? Skip to the answer

 

Table of Contents

What are YouTube tags?

Before we dive into whether tags are still important on YouTube in 2025, it’s worth clarifying exactly what they are.

YouTube tags are a hidden metadata field on videos that helps the YouTube algorithm categorize the video.

Or at least, that was their original purpose.

How did tags work on YouTube in the past?

In the early days of YouTube, it was both technically & financially infeasible to analyze all of the videos uploaded to YouTube to determine the topics that they covered.

This obviously posed a major problem for both YouTube & creators alike. If the algorithm doesn’t have any sense of what videos are about, then it has no idea which videos to rank for a given search query.

To address this issue, YouTube provided creators with a Tags field where they could self-supply the list of keywords that they think the video should rank for. In fact, they even required tags initially!

If you’re thinking to yourself, “But wouldn’t creators just tag to their videos with as many popular tags as they could, even if they weren’t related?” — then you’re absolutely right.

YouTube quickly responded by banning "over tagging", which can result in your video being removed by YouTube to this day. However, that only addressed the most blatant forms of abuse. Even the good creators obviously had strong incentives to expand the keywords to related topics that weren’t necessarily actually covered in the video.

This meant that the search results that YouTube served up were less relevant to the user’s search query, resulting in a poorer user experience and an increase in failed searches. For a product that makes its money from advertising, that was a problem worth throwing some serious brainpower & funding behind.

Which brings us to the AI chapter of the story.

Why are tags less important on YouTube now?

With some of the leading minds in Artificial Intelligence (AI) working for Google, they were well-equipped for the challenge of automatically analyzing the topic of videos.

If they were able to pull off that miraculous feat, not only would search become far more targeted and relevant, it would also improve YouTube’s ability to recommend similar videos to users within their feed. In other words, it had the potential to increase user engagement product-wide — which would in turn translate directly to more ad dollars for YouTube.

Over the years, they slowly chipped away at the problem. In 2009, YouTube began analyzing the audio content of videos and automatically captioning videos.

The next phase took much longer, but built upon that newfound rich data source to glean the topics covered and relevant keywords directly from the video content itself. They’ve expanded this even further in the years since by analyzing the visual content of the video as well — even including the video’s thumbnail!

These mind-blowing innovations finally gave YouTube the power to know precisely what a video was about, without needing to rely on the tags that creators supplied themselves.

Do tags still help YouTube videos rank?

What YouTube officially says 🏛️

YouTube’s Creator Liaison Todd Beaupré expanded on this in a video all the way back in 2018:

It’s worth noting that while both YouTube's help documentation and Todd mention that tags don’t matter much, they still imply that they do have some impact.

So the question is, how much impact do they still make? Let’s dive into the data to figure out how important tags are on YouTube in 2025.

What studies of YouTube have found 📈

Many articles cite out-of-date studies, like a 2018 study from Briggsby and a 2017 study from Backlinko, but the YouTube algorithm in 2025 is unrecognizable from the algorithm that those old studies analyzed. When it comes to staying on top of YouTube SEO best practices, it’s critical to seek out current information from more recent analyses.

A recent study from 2024 analyzed the correlation between tags & views and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. Interestingly, they also found an even stronger positive relationship for videos that contained tags and received a high number of likes. Meaning, when videos received more likes, the positive effect of the tags was amplified. Quite the fascinating insight!

“The interaction factors (Likes × Tags) are statistically significant, suggesting that the number of views is significantly influenced by the interaction between these variables.”
- Study: Factors that influence the popularity of YouTube videos

What other experiments show 🧪

People often also reference a 2007 experiment by MrBeast in which he tags a video with a made up tag, and the video didn’t appear for that search term. However, when he added that same made up word to the description, that video did appear.

This was certainly an interesting result, but we know the YouTube algorithm has changed quite a lot since 2007, so let’s look for a more recent experiment.

In 2023, suspecting that the oft-repeated advice about tags might be wrong, one YouTube creator ran a mini-experiment on his videos to test the impact of tags for himself.

First he split his videos into two groups: one control group & one test group. The control group remained unchanged (no tags changed), while the test group had their low-performing tags replaced with the highest-performing tags in other languages like French & Japanese. The result was a boost in views from those regions – on some days, the video’s viewership in France & Japan even surpassed the U.S. views​!

This well-structured experiment clearly demonstrates that tags can indeed still have a large impact, especially when used strategically.

Then how many YouTube tags should I use?

Honestly, for new creators, the answer is still probably zero.

Even though there’s evidence that YouTube tags do help, spending time adding them probably just isn’t worth it early on. If you add too many tasks to the process of publishing each video when you’re just starting out, you’ll start to feel bogged down and potentially even avoid making videos at all as a result.

That said, given what we learned about the magnifying effect of likes, if your videos start to receive a high number of likes (perhaps they already do!), then using tags may yield more results. Until then, you’re likely far better off focusing on creating high-quality content on a consistent schedule than wasting your time meticulously adding & reordering tags.

But if you want to do everything you can to boost your videos’ chances, by all means continue adding 8-12 tags to your videos!

Especially if you have a YouTube SEO tool that can automatically add your target keywords to the Tags field during the video upload process within YouTube Studio. That way it doesn’t add much additional effort to your workflow, and your videos might still see some small boost. Just quickly add your top eight keywords as tags, then move on.

Does YouTube SEO even matter in 2025?

Absolutely it does! In fact, we believe it’s more important than ever!

It’s true that with the advent of AI, YouTube no longer has to rely on the tags you provide in order to help understand what your video is about. Gone are the days of being able to directly influence which keywords your video will rank for with tags.

But to claim that YouTube SEO no longer matters now that YouTube can understand video content is like saying that Google SEO doesn’t matter because they can read the words in the articles. After all, that’s how Google SEO has always worked!

YouTube SEO can still be an incredibly effective way to grow a channel in 2025 — especially if your channel is new and doesn’t already have a large subscriber base.

You simply need to refocus your attention from YouTube tags to YouTube keywords.

Keywords are a rich source of ideas for videos 🏴‍☠️

Great video ideas are like gold for creators, and keywords are your treasure map. Without a sense of the relative search volume between the topics your target audience is searching for, you’re effectively flying blind.

Fortunately, YouTube keywords provide invaluable insights into what YouTube viewers care about most. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a better source of the topics that would resonate than the keywords your potential viewers are out there actively searching for themselves.

An accurate YouTube keyword tool will not only show you all of the keywords your target audience cares about, but also the relative search volume between them. In other words, you can see how much viewers care about each topic relative to the others. Like we said… gold.

ChannelStudio makes uncovering great video ideas super simple. Just research YouTube keywords, save the ones that are relevant to your channel, then organize them into video ideas. Best of all, once you’re ready to work on one of your ideas, you’ll already have a collection of keywords to target or research further.

Get the free YouTube SEO extension

Do keyword research before you start a video 🔍

To leverage YouTube SEO to grow your channel in 2025, you need to go further than just optimizing your video's title & description for your target keywords. You need to integrate SEO even more deeply into your workflow, as well as start earlier in the process.

Just as master content marketers do with Google keywords before writing an article, you need to know exactly what YouTube keywords your video is targeting — even before you write the first word of the video’s script.

In fact, keywords can be a great place to start when deciding on an outline.

You’ve just read an article that is well-researched, written 100% by a human, and based on solid data. But it also conveniently used the exact language of the top keywords related to the topic I’m covering. And hopefully you didn’t even notice, because they were generally the topics you wanted to know about anyway.

Which brings us back to why keywords are such a valuable map for creators like us. They not only tell us what videos to make, but also what to cover and how to structure them.

Bonus points for adding chapters to your video with keywords included within the chapter names. Doing this can greatly increase your video’s chances of getting top billing when Google shows video results at the top of the Google search results page for those keywords, since they prefer videos that allow them to deep-link directly to a relevant chapter.

Optimize your video’s script for target keywords 📝

Once you’re ready to write a script for your video, keep an eye out for opportunities to naturally work in the video’s target keywords into the script itself.

Ideally you’ll be able to use the version of the keyword that has the highest search volume a few times in a natural way, but don’t be afraid to include versions that are searched less frequently or even break up the keywords with another word in the middle; just as I’ve done with the word “even” in the Does YouTube SEO even matter heading above, which is targeting the keyword “does youtube seo matter”.

That’s because YouTube’s sophisticated algorithm is able to understand the meaning behind the words & phrases you use, so they will know to rank your video for those keywords anyway. In fact, they’ll likely see your natural use of an alternative phrasing as being a signal of quality — since spammy over-optimized videos typically repeat the top keyword over-and-over in an unnatural way.

YouTube’s algorithm has a detailed understanding of the relationship between keywords. Which is precisely why we recommend starting by saving all keywords related to your niche, then lumping the keywords that are related to one another into topics. By naturally using variations of keywords that are related to a certain topic (e.g. “are youtube tags important”, “do tags matter on youtube”), you can effectively mirror what YouTube’s understanding of a given topic is — making it far more likely that they’ll rank your video for it.

Don’t worry too much about using the correct keywords while you’re writing the first draft of the script, as it’s typically fairly easy to find opportunities to swap out words in your script for target keywords once it’s finished. Although it can occasionally require changes in sentence structure to keep the voice over sounding natural.

Once you’ve optimized your script for your target keywords, your video should have a far better shot of ranking than those that don’t start thinking about SEO until they are writing their video’s title & description. Consider it a reward for staying up to date on the latest YouTube SEO best practices.

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