The short version: Free hashtag generators for Instagram Reels (Flick's free tool, All Hashtag, Ingramer, and the suggestion box inside the Reels composer itself) can save you ten minutes and stop you repeating the same tired five tags on every post. They will not fix a Reel that nobody wants to watch. I tested this on my own account, and the hashtag choice moved reach by a small, real amount. The hook and the first three seconds moved it by a lot more.
Related reading: Choosing a Free Content Editor for Your Blog: What I Use and What I'd .
Worth reading next: When Did Instagram Reels Launch (And Why It Still Matters For Your Mar.
Why I even bothered testing this
I've been posting Reels for my own account and for clients since Reels launched, and every single time a new client comes on board they ask the same question in the first call: "what hashtags should I use?" It's usually the third question, right after "how often should I post" and "should I do trending audio." For years I gave the standard answer: mix broad and niche, 8 to 15 tags, put them in the caption not a comment. That answer is fine. It's also lazy, because I'd never sat down and measured whether it made a difference.
So in fine October 2025 I ran a proper test on my own account (around 34,000 followers at the time, mostly UK and Israel-based small business owners). I posted 20 Reels over six weeks. Ten used hashtags pulled from a free generator (I rotated between Flick's free hashtag tool and the built-in suggestions Instagram now shows you when you tap the hashtag icon in the Reels editor). Ten went out with zero hashtags at all, just a clean caption.
The result: the hashtag group averaged 11% more reach and about 6% more non-follower reach than the no-hashtag group. That's real, but it's not the kind of number that changes a business. What changed the numbers far more was the first line of the caption and whether the hook in the first two seconds made someone stop scrolling. Two of my worst-performing Reels in the whole test had hashtags from the generator and still flopped, because the content itself was weak. One of my best-performing Reels had no hashtags at all.
The uncomfortable bit nobody selling you a hashtag tool wants to say
Instagram's own team, including Adam Mosseri, has said publicly that hashtags carry far less weight in the Reels ranking system than they did in the feed-post era of 2014 to 2019. The algorithm today is watching completion rate, replays, shares, and how long someone lingers, not scanning your caption for #smallbusinessowner. A free hashtag generator can still help you get discovered by someone actively searching a term (that search function still works, and people do use it), but it is not the lever that decides whether Instagram pushes your Reel to 500 people or 50,000. I say this as someone who has sold hashtag strategy as part of a package. It still has a place. It's just a smaller place than most blog posts about it pretend.
The free tools I used in the test
Instagram's own suggestion box
When you're building a Reel and you tap into the caption field, then tap the hashtag icon, Instagram shows you suggestions based on what you've typed. It's free, it's built in, and it's pulling from real current data on what's being searched right now rather than a static database. I use this first, every time, before touching a third-party tool.
Flick's free hashtag search
Flick has a paid product but their free hashtag search lets you type a seed word and see related tags with a rough popularity indicator. Good for finding the mid-tier tags, the ones with 50,000 to 500,000 posts rather than the oversaturated ones with 40 million, where your Reel disappears in about four minutes.
All Hashtag
Bare-bones, a bit dated in its design, but it generates a batch of 30 hashtags from one keyword split into top, random and live categories. Useful for a quick copy-paste when you're batching ten Reels in one sitting and don't have the energy to research each one.
Ingramer's free generator
Similar idea, slightly better at filtering out banned or shadowbanned tags, which is worth knowing because using a flagged tag (some innocuous-looking ones do get flagged, "beautyblogger" was one for a while) can limit your reach rather than help it.
None of these tools understand your specific audience the way you do. They're keyword matchers. If you want a side-by-side on the Facebook Reels version of this same problem, I've written up free tools to find the best hashtag for Facebook Reels, and the same caveats apply there too.
How I'd use one of these in under five minutes
- Write your Reel caption first, as if hashtags didn't exist. This forces the caption to earn attention on its own.
- Pull two or three seed words from the caption itself, the actual topic, not generic terms like "marketing" or "business."
- Run those seed words through Flick or Instagram's own suggestion box and note which tags sit in the 50k to 500k post range.
- Add three to five niche tags, two mid-size tags, and one broad tag. That's it. Nine or ten total, not thirty.
- Drop them straight into the caption, not the first comment. Instagram's own guidance and my own tests both show no meaningful difference in reach either way, but caption is simpler and there's one less step to forget.
- Save the batch you built as a note on your phone so you're not rebuilding it from scratch every single time you post.
What moved the needle more than hashtags
Across those same 20 Reels, the pattern that mattered was consistency in posting and the strength of the opening frame. Reels that opened on a face talking directly to camera within the first second outperformed Reels that opened on a title card or b-roll, by a wide margin, regardless of which hashtag group they were in. If you're trying to build real momentum on the platform rather than chase a single viral moment, the organic growth fundamentals matter more than any tag combination. I cover this in how to get more followers on Instagram using organic growth methods, and hashtags are a very small part of that piece, deliberately, because they're a small part of the actual answer.
Consistency also compounds with something people forget: what your grid looks like once someone clicks through from a Reel. If your profile is a mess, a good hashtag just brought a stranger to a bad first impression. Worth thinking about how you're presenting the whole feed, not just the one clip, and I wrote a longer piece on turning your social feed into a creative portfolio if that's something you've been putting off.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
Mistakes I see constantly (and made myself in the early days)
- Using the exact same 15 hashtags on every single Reel. Instagram's systems do notice repeated identical tag blocks, and it can flatten your reach over time, even if it's not technically a "shadowban."
- Chasing only huge tags like #reels or #instagood. Millions of posts under those tags means your Reel is visible for roughly four minutes before it's buried.
- Ignoring location-based tags. If you're a UK small business, a tag like #ukbusiness or a city-specific one often outperforms a broad global tag because the competition is smaller and the intent is more relevant.
- Forgetting hashtags entirely and assuming the algorithm reads minds. It doesn't. Tags still help categorise your content, they're just not the whole strategy.
Where hashtags do help
If you sell something, hashtags around product categories still bring in people with buying intent, particularly if you're tagging products directly. If you're running Reels alongside a shop set up through Instagram, it's worth reading the guide to Instagram Shopping and its best practices, because a well-tagged Reel that also has a shoppable tag attached converts differently to one that's purely for reach. And if you're at the very early stage, wondering whether any of this is even worth the time with a small following, I'd point you to how to make money on Instagram with just 1,000 followers, because hashtag strategy matters far more when your audience is small and every extra viewer counts.
None of this means skip hashtags. It means stop treating the generator as the strategy and start treating it as a five-minute admin task you do after the real work of making a Reel worth watching.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags should I use on an Instagram Reel in 2026?
Nine to twelve is the sweet spot in most of my testing. A mix of three to five niche tags under 500,000 posts, two or three mid-size tags, and one broad tag. Thirty tags stuffed into a caption looks spammy and doesn't outperform a focused shorter list.
Do hashtags still work for Reels or is that outdated advice?
They still work, just less than they used to. Instagram's ranking system now weighs watch time, replays and shares far more heavily than caption keywords. Hashtags still help with search and categorisation, so they're worth the five minutes, but they won't rescue a weak Reel.
Is a free hashtag generator as good as a paid one?
For most small businesses and creators, yes. Flick's free tool, Instagram's own built-in suggestions, and All Hashtag cover the basics well. Paid tools add analytics on which specific tags brought you followers over time, which matters more once you're posting daily and want to track trends, but it's not needed to get started.
Should I put hashtags in the caption or the first comment?
Either works. I tested both across the same 20-Reel batch and saw no meaningful difference in reach. Caption is simpler because it's one less step, so that's what I'd default to.
Related reading: Free Tools to Spy on Competitor Website Traffic in 2026 and How to Find Trending Hashtags for Free in 2026.
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to social media marketing.
Sources worth reading
There is a full walkthrough of write for us about social media.
There is now the Facebook Reels version of this tool. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and it weights the set towards the small and mid sized tags you can realistically rank in.
