Banned Hashtag Checker and Counter

How to check for banned hashtags before you post

Paste the caption you are about to publish, hashtags and all. The tool pulls out every tag, matches it against a dated list of banned hashtags, restricted terms and engagement-bait tags, and then counts the survivors against each network's published rule. You get a flag list, a per-platform green, amber or red readout, and a cleaned set of tags you can copy straight back into your post.

Every flag is labelled so you know how seriously to take it. Restricted means the platform visibly limits or redirects that term — usually a self-harm, eating-disorder or illegal-goods phrase, where the restriction is a safety measure rather than a penalty on you. Reported banned means the creator community has tested the tag and found it dead or throttled; that is useful intelligence, not an official ruling, because no platform publishes a list. Spam signal covers follow-for-follow and like-for-like tags, which are the fastest way to attract bots and the most common self-inflicted reach problem. Too generic is not a warning at all — it is a budget note, because with only five Instagram slots, spending one on a tag with hundreds of millions of posts is almost always a waste.

The tool also catches two quieter problems: duplicated tags, which still burn a slot, and tags containing punctuation or symbols, which never become links in the first place. Facebook's own help page states that a hashtag must be written as a single word without spaces, and that "punctuation and special characters (like $ and %) won't work."

The hashtag limits this tool counts against

These are the rules the counter uses. Every number below was checked against the platform's own documentation on 20 September 2026, because the widely repeated figures — "30 on Instagram", "15 on YouTube" — are now simply wrong.

• Instagram — 5, a hard cap. Instagram cut the limit from 30 to five for feed posts and Reels, announced on 18 December 2025. Its stated reasoning is that "using fewer (up to 5) more targeted hashtags, rather than many generic ones, can improve both your content's performance and people's experience on Instagram." The caption and first comment share the same five slots, so the old trick of hiding a second block in the comments buys you nothing.
• YouTube — 60, a hard cap. YouTube Help is explicit: "If a video or playlist has more than 60 hashtags, we'll ignore each hashtag on that content." Only the three considered most engaging appear beside your video title, so order your description accordingly.
• X (Twitter) — no cap, two recommended. X does not enforce a number but recommends no more than two hashtags per post.
• LinkedIn — no published cap. LinkedIn has never published a hashtag limit. The range every major guide converges on is three to five relevant tags, so that is what the counter marks green.
• Facebook — no cap, no recommendation. Facebook's help centre documents only the mechanics: hashtags "turn topics and phrases into clickable links in your posts on your personal timeline, Page or groups," must be a single word, and can contain numbers but not punctuation.
• TikTok — no published count limit. TikTok does not publish a maximum number of hashtags. What it does publish is the caption field limit: its Content Posting API reference caps the title field at 2,200 UTF-16 characters, and your hashtags are spent out of that budget. The counter tracks both.
• Pinterest — hashtags are effectively deprecated. Pinterest's current Pin specification page does not mention hashtags at all. Put your keywords in the Pin title and the 800-character description instead, which Pinterest says is "used by our algorithm to determine relevance for delivery."

Banned hashtags, shadowbans, and what is actually happening

"Shadowban" is a creator word, not a platform feature. No major network confirms a mechanism under that name, and treating it as a mystical punishment leads people to delete good posts for no reason. What demonstrably exists is reduced distribution: a restricted tag returns no recent posts, a spam-signal tag pulls in bot accounts whose engagement the ranking systems discount, and a post stuffed past a hard cap can lose its tags entirely — YouTube ignores all 60-plus of them, and Instagram strips or blocks anything past five.

The practical response is unglamorous. Run the caption through this checker, remove anything flagged red, cut the generic mega-tags, and keep the specific ones that actually describe the post. Then give it two weeks of normal posting before you draw conclusions, because hashtag reach is noisy and a single post proves nothing. If reach stays flat across a dozen posts with clean tags, the problem is the content or the posting time, not a secret penalty.

One more honest caveat: because no platform publishes a banned list, ours is compiled from community reporting and is date-stamped in the tool itself. Tags come off the list as often as they go on. Treat a flag as a reason to pick a better tag, not as proof of a ban.

Picking five tags that earn their slot

With a five-tag ceiling, hashtag strategy stops being about volume and becomes about precision. A workable split is one tag that names the topic, one that names the format, one that names the community, one that names the place or niche, and one branded tag you own. Specific beats big every time now: a tag with 40,000 posts that describes exactly what you made will out-deliver one with 400 million that describes nothing.

If you want to go deeper on any of this, these guides pick up where the tool stops:

• The best hashtags for every platform — how to build a five-tag set that is specific enough to rank.
• The Instagram hashtag limit explained — what changed in December 2025 and what the five-tag cap means for reach.
• Hashtags for Instagram Reels — how Reels discovery differs from the feed now that tags are capped.

From clean hashtags to published posts

Checking tags is the last step before publishing — the slow part is everything before it: writing the post, adapting it per network, remembering that Instagram takes five tags while YouTube takes sixty, and getting it all scheduled. That is what Outfeed AI does. It is a chat-first AI social media manager: you describe the post, it writes it in your brand voice, shows you a per-platform preview, and schedules and publishes to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest and Bluesky from the same conversation.

Starter is $29 a month and Pro is $59 a month, both flat rates rather than per seat — unlike Hootsuite and Sprout Social, which bill per seat from their entry tier. Outfeed AI only charges per seat at the Agency tier, at $149 per seat per month. The free trial runs 3 days and includes 100 AI credits; a card is required to start it.