If you’ve been creating on YouTube for a while, you’ve probably heard it a hundred times: “Tags don’t matter anymore.” And on the surface, that seems true. YouTube has said they rely more on titles, thumbnails, and viewer behavior. But if you’ve ever had a random old video suddenly start getting views or noticed how eerily similar videos seem to get recommended side by side then you already know: tags still play a quiet, behind-the-scenes role.

Especially when it comes to suggested videos, YouTube’s most mysterious traffic source.

Tags: The Metadata You’re Still Being Judged On

Tags may not be the headline act anymore, but they’re still backstage, pulling strings. YouTube uses them as contextual signals, especially in the early stages of a video’s life. When a video has low watch history or hasn’t built up much behavioral data, tags step in as the scaffolding.

But here’s the real secret sauce: tags influence clustering the way YouTube groups similar videos together and serves them in the sidebar or next autoplay.

If two videos share similar titles, thumbnails, and… tags there’s a high chance one will appear as a “suggested” next to the other. This is how creators get siphon-traffic from bigger channels in the same niche. I’ve seen it happen countless times, even on smaller channels.

Real Case Study: Cloning the Cluster

To test this, I recently examined three videos that popped up as suggested alongside a trending video in the minimalist living niche.

Each had:

• Different creators
• Different thumbnails
• Slightly varied titles

But when I extracted their tags using the LenosTube YouTube Tags Extractor, I noticed over 70% tag overlap. Terms like “minimalism,” “simple living,” and “declutter your life” appeared again and again.

They weren’t just in the title or description they were in the hidden tag metadata. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the clustering system at work.

The “Suggested Video Stack” Strategy

If you’re serious about growth in 2025, here’s the move: Stop thinking of tags as SEO, and start thinking of them as adjacency tools.

Instead of targeting search, use tags to position your video alongside others in your niche that are already doing well. Find their tags, identify commonalities, and build your own “suggested video stack” , a group of videos you want to be clustered with.

This is exactly where tools like the LenosTube Tags Extractor come in. You don’t need to guess what tags others are using, you can just plug in any video link and see what’s hiding under the hood. It’s not about copying; it’s about speaking the same metadata language as the algorithm’s clustering logic.

Why This Matters More Than Ever in 2025

The Suggested algorithm has become far more nuanced. YouTube is now weighing watch patterns more than ever: what people click on next, how long they stay, and what kind of content they binge in sessions. But here’s the twist: the initial clustering still often relies on shared metadata and yes, that includes tags.

For newer creators, this is one of the few leverage points you still control. You might not have a massive subscriber base or click-magnet thumbnails yet, but you can reverse engineer the tagging structures of the videos that already dominate your niche.

And while most creators have stopped paying attention to tags, thinking they’re obsolete, that’s exactly why it’s your edge.

The Bottom Line

In the chaotic arms race of YouTube content creation, every small advantage adds up. Tags won’t save a bad video. But the right tags can give your good video a fighting chance to be seen, especially if you know how to sneak it into the right suggestion clusters.

So the next time you’re optimizing your upload, don’t skip the tags. Study what’s working. And if you want to peek into the metadata of top performers, tools like the YouTube Tags Extractor from LenosTube are still among the most underrated weapons in a creator’s arsenal.

In a game where every click counts, sometimes the things you can’t see like tags are the very things pushing your content forward.