For years the advice was firm: put your hashtags in the first comment, not the caption, because Instagram treats them differently. It was repeated so often that it became a rule nobody questioned.
What Instagram has said
Instagram’s own guidance is that hashtags are counted the same either way. Whatever difference existed in an older ranking system is not something the platform claims today, and nobody outside Meta can measure it cleanly — the confounders are the post, the time and the audience, all of which move more than the placement does.
So why do people still do it
Because a wall of tags under a good sentence looks bad. That is a real reason, just not the one usually given. A caption that ends in your actual last line reads better than one that ends in twenty-eight words nobody was meant to read.
- Caption — simpler, one object to edit, nothing to go wrong at publish time
- First comment — cleaner-looking post, one more API call that can fail after the post is already live
That second failure mode is worth weighing. If the comment call fails, you have a published post with no tags and no obvious sign anything went wrong. A scheduler should tell you that happened rather than counting the publish as a clean success.
The decision that actually moves the number
Which tags, not where they sit. A handful that genuinely describe the post beats thirty that describe a category — and hashtag-attributed reach is reported separately, so you can check that claim on your own account instead of taking anyone’s word for it.