YouTube Tag Generator
Give it your video title and get a tag list back — the obvious search terms first, then the close variants, trimmed to fit the 500 characters YouTube gives the whole list. Copy it into Studio and move on. Free, with nothing to sign up for.
About the video
0 / 100 characters
0 / 300 characters
Your tags
Add a title and press Generate. You'll get 12 to 20 tags, ready to paste into YouTube Studio.
Quick facts
- How many you get
- 12 to 20 tags, trimmed to fit before you see them
- YouTube's tag budget
- 500 characters for the whole list, not per tag
- How it's counted
- the commas count, and a tag with a space in it is measured as though quoted
- Title you can give it
- up to 100 characters — YouTube's own title cap
- Where tags go
- YouTube Studio → Details → Show more → Tags
- What we keep
- nothing: no title, no description, no tags are stored
- Cost
- free, with nothing to sign up for
How it works
- Step 1
Give it the title
The title alone is enough. Add a line about what the video actually covers and the tags come back closer to the search terms your viewers would use.
- Step 2
Generate the list
You get 12 to 20 tags: the obvious search terms first, then close variants and the broader topic, with duplicates and anything too long already removed.
- Step 3
Copy and paste
Copy the whole list, or one tag at a time. They go in YouTube Studio under Details → Show more → Tags, comma separated, exactly as they appear here.
Pro tips
- Put your main search term first. It is the one tag most likely to be read as the subject of the video.
- All your tags share 500 characters, not 500 each — so a dozen good tags beats thirty padded ones.
- A tag with a space costs two extra characters, because YouTube measures it as though it were quoted. Hyphens are cheaper than spaces.
- Mix close variants with the broader topic: the exact phrase, the plain-English version, and the category the video sits in.
- Tags matter far less than your title, thumbnail and description. Treat them as a tidy-up, not a growth lever.
- Do not paste a competitor's channel or video name in. It rarely helps and YouTube's policies are explicit about misleading metadata.
- Skip hashtags here — the # belongs in the description, where YouTube renders it above the title. A tag does not need one.
- Reusing one list across every video tells YouTube nothing about any of them. Regenerate per video; it takes seconds.
- Shorts use the same tags box, and the same 500-character budget, so the list works there too.
- Come back to the tags when a video has data. If it is being found for a phrase you never listed, that phrase belongs in the list.
FAQ
How do I add tags to a YouTube video?
In YouTube Studio, open the video, choose Details, click Show more, and paste your tags into the Tags box separated by commas. They are not visible to viewers — the box sits well down the page, which is why a lot of people never find it. Generate a list above, press Copy all, and paste it straight in.
What are tags on YouTube?
Words and short phrases you add to a video to describe what it is about, mainly to help YouTube understand it when the title is ambiguous or commonly misspelled. Viewers do not see them. They are metadata, not hashtags, and they sit in their own box in YouTube Studio.
How many tags should I use on YouTube?
Between 12 and 20 is plenty, and the real limit is not a count at all — it is 500 characters shared across the whole list. Commas count toward it, and a tag containing a space is measured as though it were quoted, so a handful of long phrases can spend the budget faster than twenty short ones. This tool trims the list to fit before showing it to you.
Do YouTube tags matter?
A little, and much less than people assume. YouTube has said for years that tags play a minor role in discovery and are most useful when your content is commonly misspelled. Your title, thumbnail and description do the heavy lifting. Fill the tags box in properly, then stop thinking about it.
What tags should I use for my video?
The phrase someone would type to find this exact video, a couple of close variants of it, and the broader topic it belongs to. That is roughly what the generator above produces from your title: obvious search terms first, then variants, then category. Anything you would not type into a search box yourself is unlikely to earn its characters.
Is there a character limit on YouTube tags?
Yes — 500 characters for all of them together. That is the number this app enforces when it uploads a video for you, and the meter under your tags counts the same way YouTube does, including the commas and the quoting of spaced tags. Go over it and the upload itself is refused, not just the extra tags.
Can I use hashtags as tags?
You can type them, but there is no point. A hashtag belongs in the description, where YouTube turns it into a link and shows the first few above your title. In the tags box the # is just a character spending your 500 — this tool strips it for that reason.
Should I use the same tags on every video?
No. A list reused across a whole channel tells YouTube nothing about any individual video, which is the opposite of what tags are for. Keep a couple of channel-level terms if they genuinely apply, and regenerate the rest per video — it takes a few seconds.
Should I include my channel name as a tag?
One channel-name tag is reasonable, particularly if people misspell it. More than one is waste: they all come out of the same 500 characters, and nobody searching for your channel needs three variations to find it.
Can I use competitor names in my tags?
You can type them, and we would not. It rarely produces the traffic people imagine, and YouTube's policies are explicit about metadata that misleads viewers about what a video is. Tagging a video with a name it has nothing to do with is the case those policies describe.
Do tags work the same for YouTube Shorts?
Yes. Shorts use the same Tags box and the same 500-character budget, so the list works unchanged. Shorts are discovered mostly through the feed rather than search, so tags matter even less there than on a long video — but there is no reason to leave the box empty.
Does the generator use AI, and is my video idea kept?
It uses a language model to read your title, and yes — we keep the title and description you typed. They are stored with the price of the call so we can see what people are asking the tool for and what it costs us to answer; the tags it writes back are not kept, there is no account attached, and the page keeps no history you can be identified by. The request itself is routed only to providers that do not retain or train on prompts. If you would rather not leave a record, the tool works just as well on a made-up title.
Why does it give me fewer tags than I asked for?
Because the list is trimmed to fit YouTube's 500-character budget, and duplicates and anything too long to be a tag are dropped first. Getting fourteen usable tags is better than twenty that would have had the last six silently discarded — or worse, an upload refused.
Can I schedule the video with these tags?
Yes — iHatePosting uploads YouTube videos and Shorts on a schedule with the title, description, tags and privacy you choose, and it applies the same 500-character rule before sending, so a list that fits here fits there.
More free tools
Tags are the last five minutes of an upload
The rest is turning up every week. iHatePosting schedules your YouTube videos and Shorts — title, description, tags and privacy — next to the thirteen other networks you post to.