From Hashtags to Social SEO: How Content Discovery Actually Works Now For years, hashtags were the backbone of social media discovery. If you wanted reach, you stacked tags. If you wanted visibility, you chased trending hashtags. That playbook is officially outdated. In 2026, branding and discoverability no longer rely on hashtags the way they once did. Discovery is now driven by social SEO, natural language, and AI-powered search, not tag-based browsing. So… are hashtags sti