From hashtags to keywords: a practical guide to Social SEO
A hashtag in front of a word, and that word ceased to be just text: it became a place, a movement, an archive, a category. A tiny, almost democratic gesture.
That’s why the decline of the hashtag feels strange. It makes no noise, there is no “RIP #” trending. One day you simply realize you’re using it less, another day you realize that the platform is preventing you from using it as before, and at that point you ask yourself: why are they turning off this lever? The answer is usually never “because it’s no longer needed.” It’s “because it’s needed in another way.” The hashtag isn’t dying: like so many things in the digital world, it’s being scaled back and something else is growing in its place, something quieter and more powerful: Social SEO made up of keywords, context, and signals.
So the hashtag loses the hash, but not the habit.
When you start to understand this, the trend stops having a counter.
In February 2024, TikTok stopped showing how many views a hashtag had. That number that let you know whether you were looking at a global phenomenon or a local flash in the pan. The Washington Post linked this decision to the fact that those counts had been used by researchers to highlight stark differences in viewership between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine hashtags.
The point here is not just “one less metric.” It’s one less piece of readability. When you remove the ability to measure from the outside, you’re not just cleaning up the interface, you’re shifting control: fewer tools to understand what’s going on, more mandatory trust in the system.
Then, in the summer of 2025, another, even more practical signal arrived: TikTok began introducing a limit of five hashtags per post (noticed by users through in-app notifications and reported by various industry sources).
And here, too, it’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence. For years, we’ve lived in the era of “put in lots of hashtags and something will happen.” If the platform tells you “no, five at most,” it’s saying this above all: don’t build your discoverability on a manual taxonomy. Build it on content and signals.
Hashtags are ugly: when aesthetics dictate the rules
On X, the issue has become explicit, almost like a manifesto. On June 26, 2025, Elon Musk announced that hashtags would be banned from advertisements, calling them an “aesthetic nightmare.”
It’s a very clear message: hashtags are treated as a piece of interface to be eliminated, a remnant, graphic noise. When a platform decides that a practice is “ugly,” it is often preparing a replacement: fewer hashtags, more natural text, more sentences that don’t break up the reading flow.
Threads was created with this in mind: topic tags yes, but only one per post, without the requirement of the “#” symbol and with support for sentences. Mosseri explained it simply: a single tag reduces engagement hacking and makes the experience cleaner.
And what about Instagram, which for years has been the capital of hashtag stuffing? In 2025, there were several reports and alerts about tests that drastically reduced the number of hashtags that could be used, with in-app alerts on some accounts. Yet hashtags remain, but they become support, no longer structure.
From hashtag to control: what were we really doing when we used hashtags?
Sometimes we treated them as a reach trick, but hashtags were something simpler and more powerful: a public label, readable by everyone. They said “this content belongs here,” and that “here” was decided by the community, not the platform.
Think of #ThrowbackThursday: it wasn’t a strategy, it was a ritual. Think of the big social tags: they were digital town squares. It’s no coincidence that Pew Research analyzed ten years of #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter, collecting all public tweets with that hashtag since 2013: over 44 million.
Then there is an even more sensitive issue: transparency. When a hashtag had counters and dedicated pages, it made one fundamental thing visible: “how much” and “how” a topic was circulating. If something jammed, you could see it.
In June 2020, TikTok ended up at the center of controversy because some hashtags related to #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd appeared with zero counts. TikTok spoke of a technical glitch, but the important thing was that the problem became contestable because it was measurable from the outside.
Today, however, platforms tell you, “Don’t worry, we understand everything with AI,” and technically, that’s true. NLP, computer vision, behavioral signals: they can deduce topic and context without you writing a hashtag.
Instagram, for example, when explaining how search works, says that in addition to the text you type, it uses signals from accounts, hashtags, and locations. So the hashtag doesn’t disappear from the machine, it just stops being the steering wheel and becomes one of the sensors.
We are moving from bottom-up classification to proprietary classification. Before, it was you, together with others, who gave name and form to a conversation. Today, that conversation is pigeonholed by automated systems: rankings, topics, search suggestions, implicit categories, and these systems are more difficult to read and challenge because they do not have a simple public label to discuss.
It is no coincidence that recent studies have begun to question the transparency of TikTok’s “search recommendations,” because they are becoming the infrastructure of visibility, but with rules that are difficult to observe from the outside.
The replacement: Social SEO is the hashtag that has learned to write naturally
If hashtags are losing their centrality, it is not just for aesthetic reasons, but because of an evolution in social media information retrieval. We have moved from cataloging based on “labels” (taxonomy) to cataloging based on entities and relationships (ontology). Social SEO is no longer the old keyword stuffing applied to captions, but a complex optimization activity that aims to make content understandable not only to the user, but above all to the platforms’ Natural Language Processing (NLP) models.
From an SEO perspective, we could say that the focus has shifted from the “keyword” to the search intent. If people use TikTok or Instagram as search engines (the famous 40% figure cited by Google), platforms must ensure relevant results, and relevance today is built on three pillars:
- Entity analysis (On-Page/On-Post): The algorithm does not just read the caption. It analyzes speech (audio-to-text), native subtitles, and visual elements (computer vision). If you sell “eyeglasses,” the algorithm cross-references the word spoken in the video with the text on the screen and the account category. Semantic consistency means that every signal must point to the same entity.
- Behavioral relevance signals: Unlike classic SEO where backlinks reign supreme, in Social SEO the “link” is user behavior. If a user searches for “summer recipes” and interacts with your video, that signal of post-search engagement elevates your ranking for that thematic cluster.
- The decline of “broad hashtags”: Using #marketing today is as useless as trying to rank on Google for the single word “shoes.” The winning strategy shifts to Long-Tail Keywords naturally inserted into the text: “marketing strategies for e-commerce 2025.”
In this scenario, hashtags survive only as “micro-data” to help the algorithm confirm the context when semantic signals are ambiguous. They are the support, no longer the backbone of discoverability.
Social Search Optimization: the future of social media
While the loss of the “hash tag” might seem like a limitation to democratic bottom-up classification, the transition to a Social Search Optimization model represents, for those involved in content strategy, an extraordinary evolution in terms of traffic quality and content durability.
1. Overcoming noise: from quantity to relevance
The most immediate “gain” is the end of the era of noise. With hashtags, visibility was often the result of a “volume battle”: people tried to dominate crowded tags in the hope of capturing a few seconds of attention. Today, Social SEO gives us back control over relevance. Content structured according to semantic criteria is not only “seen,” but ‘proposed’ to a user who has expressed a specific search intent. This means moving from random reach to qualified interaction, reducing the bounce rate of attention.
2. Extending the “shelf life” of content
One of the historical limitations of social media has always been volatility: a post would “die” in a matter of hours. Social SEO transforms the post into an evergreen asset. If you optimize a video or caption for specific keywords (e.g., “how to configure Google Search Console” or “best SEO tools 2025”), that content no longer depends exclusively on the immediate algorithmic feed. It begins to live a life of its own in the internal search results of platforms, continuing to generate impressions months after publication. We are finally bringing the concept of organic positioning within the closed confines of social media.
3. UX Writing and Conversion Rate
Abandoning the “shopping lists” of hashtags at the bottom of posts is not only an aesthetic victory, but also a gain in terms of User Experience. A clean caption, written in natural language and rich in contextual keywords, guides the user towards the call-to-action without distractions. The content becomes more readable, more professional, and, as a result, more authoritative. We gain in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): less visual friction, more space for the marketing message.
4. Cross-Platform Synergy
There is also an infrastructural advantage: traditional search engines such as Google are increasingly indexing social content (Shorts, TikTok, LinkedIn posts) based precisely on text and semantic signals. Writing for Social SEO means, by extension, doing traditional SEO. A post that is well indexed within the platform is much more likely to appear in a Google SERP for a long-tail search, creating a direct bridge between social media marketing and global organic search.
It’s not a funeral: it’s the opening of a new SERP
We are not facing the end of an era, but the expansion of the boundaries of our profession. Hashtags are not disappearing because they are obsolete, but because they have been absorbed by a much more sophisticated indexing system. Platforms have stopped asking us “what is this post about” via a hashtag, because they are now able to figure it out for themselves by analyzing every single signal.
Doing SEO on social media today means stopping thinking of content as “posts” and starting to treat it as answers to specific queries.
The transition from hashtags to social SEO requires us to apply our technical skills to new verticals:
- Native keyword research: Words are no longer chosen based on trends, but on search volume and relevance within the platform.
- On-Page (or On-Post) Semantics: Captions, image alt-text, subtitles, and even video scripts become the new battleground for optimization.
- Behavioral Ranking Signals: Ranking is no longer determined by trends, but by the ability of content to satisfy the user’s intent (Retention, Save, and Search Journey).
As we say goodbye to the hashtag, we welcome a language made up of entities, contexts, and semantic signals. It is no longer time to “label” the web; it is time to optimize the search experience wherever it takes place.
Stop counting hashtags and start counting keywords. The engine has changed, but the rules of the game have not: the winner is whoever can be found at the exact moment the user is searching.
