If you post on socials for your own business, you’ve probably wondered whether the hashtags you’re adding still do anything, or whether the caption itself is what’s actually getting you seen.
Or maybe, you’ve heard that hashtags are dead?
It’s a fair thing to wonder, because the answer’s changed in the last couple of years. Instagram, TikTok and even LinkedIn have turned into search engines in their own right and it’s changed how your posts and accounts get found.
- Hashtags used to be how these platforms sorted content. That's largely gone: Instagram now caps effective hashtag use at a handful per post and dropped hashtag-following altogether.
- Captions, alt text, on-screen text and spoken audio in videos are what the algorithms actually read now to work out what a post is about and who should see it
- A 2024 SOCi survey, still widely cited in 2026, found Gen Z splitting their search behaviour almost evenly across Instagram (67%), TikTok (62%) and Google (61%). They're not abandoning one for another, they're using all three.
- Just write a caption that answers the exact thing someone typed or said out loud.
Hashtags had a good run
For years, hashtags were the categorisation system. Tag a post #brisbanecafe and it landed in a browsable feed of everyone else who’d done the same. Follow a hashtag and its best posts showed up in your feed automatically. It was a real, working discovery mechanism, and stacking 20 or 30 tags onto a post actually genuinely moved reach.
That’s not how the platforms work anymore. Instagram has walked back hashtag-following entirely and recommends using somewhere around 3 to 5 relevant tags rather than maxing out the field.
This isn’t a trend (although, yes, hashtags are kind of tacky now). It’s a product decision the platform made, and it’s the reason a lot of hashtag advice still floating around is a few years out of date.
The platforms didn't replace Google. They joined it.
Search is spread out now. A 2024 SOCi survey, still widely cited in 2026, shows Gen Z searching Instagram, TikTok and Google in almost identical proportions: 67%, 62% and 61%. So, it’s not people dropping Google for TikTok, it’s people using whichever one seems likely to have the answer, sometimes all three for the same question.
For your business, that means treating each platform’s search bar as a real, active surface, not just the main feed. Someone is typing or saying a question out loud and expecting an answer, and it might as well be your post that gives it to them.
So what's actually doing the discovery work now
This is where the SEO instincts you already apply to your website turn out to be exactly what socials reward too.
Captions written in plain, natural phrasing, the way someone would actually search, now carry more weight than any hashtag. “Best vegan brunch in Sydney” written into a caption does more than #brunch ever will.
Alt text is doing double duty. Its actual job is accessibility, describing an image for someone using a screen reader, and that’s still the priority. But it’s also read and indexed by the platform, so a well-written, genuinely descriptive alt text is a real discoverability tool, not a workaround or cheatcode.
On-screen text and spoken audio in video are transcribed and indexed on TikTok and Reels now. What you say in a video and what’s written across the screen both count toward what the post gets matched to.
And covering a topic properly – the related questions someone would actually ask around it – beats repeating one exact phrase over and over. It’s the same semantic logic that governs a well-structured web page, just applied to a 30-second video.
Are hashtags dead, then?
No, not necessarily. Hashtags still have a real, smaller job: niche categorisation, and branded or local tags that help build a community around your account over time.
Picked with intent, a handful of genuinely relevant tags still earn their place at the end of a caption. What they don’t do anymore is drive reach on their own.
It’s kind of dealer’s choice and a decision that should be made with your goals in mind.
At Excite Media, we aren’t really using hashtags anymore and we have seen no impact on reach, in fact, we’ve seen an uplift in views since focusing on search queries. But it’s worth noting that the change hasn’t been in isolation, so a true comparison can’t be made.
The question you should be asking
It’s not really a contest between SEO and hashtags. It’s whether your caption answers the exact thing someone typed or said out loud to find you. If it would, the discovery takes care of itself. If it wouldn’t, no number of hashtags is going to fix that.
Want a hand auditing what your social content is actually optimised for? Chat to us 👋
