3 Things

Are they alive? Are they dead? Does #sweaterweather even mean anything anymore?!

The truth is, hashtags are still here. They just aren’t what they used to be. Hashtags have gone from a quick way to expand reach and get instant distribution to mostly being used to categorize content. Think of them as labels rather than megaphones.

These days, a hashtag is one clue among many. Platforms also read your caption, the text on your video, and even what you say out loud. Whether anyone actually sees your post comes down to whether people watch, save, and share it. The hashtag just tells the app where to file it.

Over the last couple of years, platforms have slowly pushed hashtags out of the spotlight. In 2024, LinkedIn and Instagram both removed the option to follow hashtags, and plenty of creators took that as a sign that hashtags were officially useless. X went even further and banned hashtags from ads entirely in 2025.

Say you run a taco shop. Every shop has that regular who means well, tells people about you, and gets it wrong. They say you’re open Mondays. You haven’t been open Mondays in two years. They quote an old menu price or send a friend to the back door that’s only for deliveries. Now imagine that regular talking to thousands of people at once. That’s roughly what happens when someone asks an AI assistant about your business. Except the regular has at least eaten there. The assistant hasn’t tasted the salsa or leaned over the counter to ask what costs extra. Everything it knows comes from information published somewhere.

You can’t control every impression of your business. But you can control what you publish.

An assistant may answer from training data, an older copy of your page, a directory listing, or a review site. Even when it retrieves your website, it may not get the current version. That’s why the Mondays problem persists. You updated your hours, but the answer came from somewhere else. Before rewriting your website, check the answer’s sources, if it provides them. If the stale hours live in a directory, fix the directory. Your homepage wasn’t the problem.

Sometimes there are no sources, and you can’t trace the mistake. Keep your website and profiles current anyway. Better information raises the odds of a correct answer. It doesn’t guarantee the next one.

Attribution is not a black-and-white, simple story, because the customer journey isn’t straightforward or predictable. Not to mention, we make decisions with information that is both conscious and unconscious. The unconscious is one of my favorite nuances, but we’ll leave that out for now.

As much as we are able, we track conversion actions and attribution. We do this to better understand which marketing is working. For example, this is very useful with Google Ads and conversion actions taken within the attribution window. Someone could have clicked on an ad, gone to the website, and done nothing. Then later, possibly two weeks to a month later, they came back and took a conversion action on the website, and we attribute that conversion to the ad.

But was the conversion action taken solely because of that ad? We don’t know. The information is still very useful, though, because that ad was involved.

What can happen is that a business owner might not know that the person who took the conversion action also has a friend who said nice things about the business, and/or that a social media post made them feel good about the business, and/or that a particular review resonated with them, and/or that an AI chat told them even more and solidified what they’d heard (and on and on it goes).