YouTube Tag Cleaner

Paste a messy list of tags and get a clean one back: duplicates, empty entries, stray hashtags and quotes are removed, and the counter shows how much of YouTube's 500-character tag limit you use, counted the same way YouTube Studio counts it.

Your tags (separate with commas or new lines)

Remove duplicates (ignore upper/lower case) Remove # from tags Make all tags lowercase Sort A to Z Drop tags that do not fit in 500 characters

Clean tags

Click a tag to leave it out. Click it again to bring it back.

Why clean your YouTube tags?

Tag lists collected from several videos or tools quickly fill up with repeats like "tiny house" and "Tiny House", stray hashtags and empty entries. Writing the same tag twice in different upper or lower case does not give YouTube new information, but it does use up characters from your 500-character limit. A clean list leaves room for tags that actually describe your video.

What does the tag cleaner change?

Duplicates: tags that differ only in upper or lower case are kept once, in the order they first appear.
Hashtags and quotes: a leading # and the quotes YouTube Studio adds around tags with spaces are removed.
Spaces and empty tags: extra spaces are squeezed and empty entries between commas are dropped.
Characters YouTube does not accept: < and > are removed.
Optional: make every tag lowercase, sort the list from A to Z, or drop the tags that no longer fit in 500 characters.

How does YouTube count the 500 characters?

YouTube Studio adds up the length of all tags, counts the commas between them, and counts two extra characters for every tag that contains a space, because it wraps those tags in quotes. That is why a list can be rejected even when it looks shorter than 500 characters. The counter on this page uses the same rule, and so does our Youtube Character Counter.

How to use the YouTube Tag Cleaner

Paste your tags into the first box, separated by commas or one per line.
Choose the options you want. The clean list updates as you type.
Click a tag in the result to leave it out, and click it again to bring it back.
Copy the clean list and paste it into the tags field in YouTube Studio.

Where can I find tags to start with?

Look up the tags of videos similar to yours with the Youtube Tag Extractor or the Youtube Shorts Tag Extractor. Both have a button that sends the tags they find straight to this cleaner.