YouTube hashtag data: 50 niches, 5,416 videos
Which hashtags do the top-ranking YouTube videos and Shorts actually use? We searched 50 niche hashtags, took roughly the first 100 results for each, and counted every hashtag in their titles and description snippets. Collected 30 October 2026.
Headline findings
- 2,982 of the 5,416 videos (55.1%) carry at least one hashtag. The share ranges from about 20% in #investing to about 88% in #drawing.
- In all 50 niches the niche keyword itself is the most-used tag. The second tag is usually a close synonym or the parent topic: #gym under #fitness, #art under #drawing, #outdoors under #camping.
- #viral, #fyp and #trending appear in the top-tag lists of 25, 23 and 21 niches respectively, but each is used by only a handful of videos per niche.
- Hands-on, visual niches (drawing, hair, art, woodworking, DIY) tag heavily. Money and phone-tech niches (investing, crypto, iPhone, real estate, Android) tag the least.
Explore the 50 niches
Click a column heading to sort. Click a niche to see its top tags and how many videos use each.
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Top tags
| # | Tag | Videos | Share of tagged videos |
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How the data was collected
For each of 50 niche keywords we ran a signed-out YouTube search for the hashtag (for example #baking), took the first few pages of results (videos and Shorts together, about 100 per niche), and extracted every hashtag in each video’s title and description snippet. We then counted, per niche, how many videos used each tag. Tags that are platform noise (#shorts, #youtubeshorts, #subscribe) were dropped, and we excluded the sample for any niche where the niche tag itself appeared on fewer than two videos. Searches were run from the United States on 30 October 2026.
Two limits worth stating. Search results favour popular videos, so this describes what successful videos do, not what the average upload does. And a description snippet is truncated, so videos that bury hashtags at the end of a long description are undercounted.
Download and reuse
Files: niches.csv (one row per niche) and tags.csv (one row per niche and tag, with its rank and the number of videos using it). The raw JSON and a rank-check script are in the GitHub repository.
License: CC BY 4.0. Please cite “Crestline Social, YouTube hashtag study, October 2026” and link to the full write-up.
Need a keyword outside these 50? The live hashtag generator runs the same count for any keyword.