YouTube Tag Generator

How to use the tag generator

1. Enter your title or the main topic of the video in plain words, the way a viewer would search for it.
2. Add other keywords separated by commas: alternative names, common misspellings, the product or place in the video.
3. Tick any variations that genuinely describe the video, like “for beginners” or “tutorial”.
4. Copy all the tags, or tap individual ones, and paste them into the Tags box in YouTube Studio (under “Show more” on the video details page).

How much do tags matter?

Less than most people think. YouTube's own help page on tags says they “can be useful if content in your video is commonly misspelled” and that otherwise they “play a minimal role in your video's discovery”. Your title, thumbnail and description, and how viewers respond to the video, matter far more.

So use tags for what they're good at:

• Misspellings and alternative spellings of names, brands or places.
• Synonyms your audience might use (e.g. “cell phone” and “mobile phone”).
• Specific details that don't fit in the title, such as a model number or a recipe ingredient.

Don't add tags that don't describe the video. YouTube's spam and deceptive practices policy treats excessive or misleading tags as a violation, and stuffing a list with popular but unrelated terms won't help.

How YouTube counts the 500 characters

The YouTube Data API documentation sets the limit at 500 characters for all tags combined, and explains two details that catch people out:

• The commas between tags count towards the total.
• A tag that contains a space is stored inside quotation marks, so it costs 2 extra characters. “Foo-Baz” is 7 characters, but “Foo Baz” is 9.

That's why a list that looks like 480 characters can be rejected. The generator counts every tag this way and stops adding tags before the budget runs out. To check a list you wrote yourself, paste it into the character counter, which has a YouTube tags mode.

Worked example

Topic: “How to start a vegetable garden”. Extra keywords: “raised beds, beginner gardening”. The generator produces the exact phrase first (how to start a vegetable garden, 31 characters + 2 for quotes), then your phrases (raised beds, beginner gardening), variations, two-word combinations such as vegetable garden, and finally single words such as gardening. If you only need ten tags, keep the top ten: they're ordered from most to least specific.

A sensible tag routine

1. Start with the one phrase that best describes the video.
2. Add two or three variations and any common misspellings.
3. Add a broader topic tag or two.
4. Stop. Five to fifteen accurate tags are plenty; filling all 500 characters isn't a goal.

Put the effort you save into the title. Our YouTube title checker shows whether your keyword survives truncation, and the hashtag generator makes the hashtags that appear above your title.

Frequently asked questions