Do hashtags belong in alt text?

You just finished writing alt text for a product photo. Out of habit, you tack on "#skincare #glowup #shopsmall" at the end, the same way you would in the caption. Then you pause: does that actually do anything in this field, or is it just extra typing?

Short answer: no, hashtags don't belong in alt text. Here's why, and where to put them instead.

The habit is understandable. Most teams write the caption first, hashtags and all, then copy that same block of text into the alt text field because it's already sitting on the clipboard and the deadline is close. It feels efficient. It just doesn't do what you'd expect it to do.

Alt text isn't rendered content — it's an attribute

A caption is copy the platform parses and displays: it scans for "#" and "@", turns matches into clickable links, and feeds them into search and discovery. Alt text works differently. It lives in an attribute attached to the image, read aloud by screen readers and indexed by search crawlers as a description — never parsed for tags, never rendered as clickable text. Type a hashtag into the alt text field on Instagram, X, Facebook, or LinkedIn and it stays exactly what it looks like: a pound sign and some letters, with no link and no discovery benefit attached.

What a screen reader actually does with it

Screen readers announce "#" as "hash" or "number sign," then read whatever follows as one unbroken string. Without camel case, "#skincareglowup" doesn't come out as two words — it comes out as a single string of letters the reader has to guess at, dropped into the middle of what should be a clean description of your photo. That's the opposite of what alt text is for.

The strong version tells a screen reader user exactly what's in the photo. The weak version buries that description under three hashtags that don't click, don't get indexed, and don't do anything except add noise.

Where hashtags should actually go

The caption or the first comment — wherever the platform's own hashtag parsing lives. That's the only place a hashtag becomes a live, clickable, discoverable tag. Alt text has one job: describe the image for someone who can't see it. Let each field do the one thing it's actually built to do, and neither one has to compromise for the other.

If you're rewriting alt text across old posts, this is a fast check to run: does the alt text describe the picture, or does it repeat what's already sitting in the caption? If it's the second one, that's the moment to fix it.

The one exception worth naming: a hashtag that functions as a proper noun, like a branded campaign name someone might genuinely need read aloud to understand a photo's context ("part of our #ShopSmallSeries pop-up"). Even then, write it in plain words first and keep the tag itself in the caption, where it can still do its actual job.