So Pinfluencing just put out a new research article on something I feel like everyone in the Pinterest world has an opinion on - do hashtags actually help your pins rank?
Short answer is no, lol.
But the way they got to that answer is actually the interesting part, so I wanted to share it here.
What they did was look at about 127 million Pinterest search rankings, covering around 56 million different pins across roughly 1.3 million searches.
Every one of those is basically a record of where a pin showed up for a certain search.
They only looked at the normal (organic) results, so no promoted pins, and it’s the default logged-out results, not what you’d see in your own personalized feed. Then they compared the pins that had hashtags in the description against the pins that didn’t.
And at first glance, hashtags actually looked like they helped. Pins with hashtags were sitting at an average position of about 48, and pins without them were at about 51 (lower is better).
The hashtag pins were also showing up in the top 10 a little more often, 12.5% of the time vs 9.8%. If they had stopped there, the article would’ve been “yes, go add hashtags to everything,” and that’s pretty much the advice you see floating around everywhere.
But that comparison throws all the accounts into one big pile - huge accounts, brand new accounts, and everything in between.
And account size has its own big effect on how well you rank, completely separate from hashtags. So they split everything up by how many followers the account had, and it completely flipped.
Under 1K followers, the pins without hashtags ranked slightly better. 1K-10K followers, same thing.
Over 10K followers, same thing again.
In every single group where they actually knew the account size, the pins with hashtags ranked the same or a little worse. It’s not a huge difference (about a spot or so), but it’s going the wrong direction.
So where did that “hashtags help” number come from? Turns out there was a big chunk of accounts they couldn’t get a follower count for, including several million pins from accounts with zero followers.
That group was about 85% of all the data, and the no-hashtag pins in it ranked noticeably worse, which dragged the whole no-hashtag average down and made hashtags look better than they really are. Once you compare like with like, the “boost” pretty much disappears.
The other thing that kinda surprised me is how few people even use them anymore.
Only about 10% of the ranking results had hashtags, and only about 7% of the actual pins used them.
So roughly 90% of what’s ranking on Pinterest right now doesn’t have a single hashtag in it. If hashtags were really a big ranking factor, you’d expect the top results to be full of them, and they just aren’t.
They also looked at the top spots specifically, since that’s where pretty much all the clicks are. In the top 10, the median position was the same with or without hashtags at every account size.
Once you get down to the top 25 and top 50 there’s a tiny gap, but when you split that up by account size it’s the same story again, and for the bigger accounts over 10K followers the hashtag pins were actually a hair worse at every level.
The one thing to keep in mind (and they say this in the article too) is that this is looking at what ranks, not proving why it ranks.
It also only looked at whether a description had hashtags or not, not how many, so there’s no “magic number” of hashtags to take from this. But if just having them doesn’t give you any lift, it’s pretty hard to justify stuffing 15-20 of them at the end of every description.
And honestly, I’ve personally never been a fan of them on any platform, but what do I know 
.
If you like adding one or two to keep your own stuff organized, it’s probably not going to hurt a smaller account. Just don’t expect them to move you up in search.
That description space is better spent actually describing what the pin is about using your keywords in a natural way, and the time you’d spend picking hashtags is better spent on a stronger title and a pin people actually want to save.
Full article is here if you want to dig into all the tables and numbers: Should You Use Hashtags on Pinterest in 2026? | Pinfluence
They’ve also done a bunch of other ones like this (description length, emojis, alt text, keyword placement, pin age, whether you even need a big following to rank, etc.), so I’ll share some of the more interesting ones here as well.
Curious if anyone here is still using hashtags on their pins, or if you’ve noticed any difference after you stopped using them!
). I like what you’re asking and may try to see. The problem is that even with the amount of crawling we’re doing, we still have so little data it’s hard to say whether a pin shows up in more searches or less due to hashtags.