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
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 🏛️
How important are tags?
Not important. Tags are primarily used to help correct for common spelling mistakes (for example YouTube vs. U Tube vs. You-tube).
- Official answer from YouTube
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
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 —
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.