Chapter Text
General
- Use the Tag Search to look up tags you’re curious about. You can search the entire tag database or narrow it down by category, and you can limit it to only canonicals if you’re looking for existing standards to use.
(Note: “Canonical” just means “a tag that has been standardized by wranglers, and can be filtered on,” not “a tag for something that happens in canon.”)
- Tag landing pages show things like what category a tag is in, and what tags are related to it. You get direct links to these pages from the Tag Search. You can also get to them by clicking the link at the top of a works page. Example: Works tagged France (Country); landing page for France (Country).
Fandom
- Use the full name of the fandom.
- Don’t use a metatag when you’re already using one of its subtags. (You can see metatag/subtag relationships on a tag’s landing page.) Example: if your fic is tagged “Elementary (TV)“, you don’t need to tag it “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms“. It will already show up in that listing anyway.
- If your fandom has the same name as another one, make sure you use a specific tag. Example: if you’re writing fic about The Avengers (Marvel Movies), use that tag! That way your fic won't get lumped in with The Avengers (TV), an unrelated British TV series.
- For crossovers, enter the names of both fandoms, as separate tags. Something like "Angel and Leverage crossover" — all one tag — is an unwrangleable Frankentag, and your fic won't show up in the works for either fandom.
Characters
- Full names, in the order of the original canon language (so "George Washington" but "Tsukino Usagi").
- If someone has a generic name that is shared by characters in other fandoms, the tag needs disambiguation to make it specific to your fandom. For example, use “Beast (Kuroshitsuji)” or “The Beast (AtS)” or “Beast (Beauty and the Beast)“, and avoid the too-generic tag “Beast“.
- If someone has multiple names/identities, you can include a nickname in quotes (“James “Bucky” Barnes“) or separate the two identities by a pipe ("Red Riding Hood | Ruby"). Different fandoms have different ways of handling this. Check the other characters in your fandom to see what the standard is.
Relationships
- Full names, in alphabetical order by family name (so, “Tsukino Usagi/George Washington”).
- Same thing for poly groupings. Examples: “Akemi Homura/Kaname Madoka/Miki Sayaka/Sakura Kyouko/Tomoe Mami“, “Bruce Banner/Clint Barton/Steve Rogers/Natasha Romanov/Tony Stark/Thor“.
- For generic/one-name characters:
- If they're paired with specific character(s) from the same fandom, no need to disambiguate: "Loki/Tony Stark"
- If all characters are generic, but from the same fandom, you only need to put the fandom once at the end: "Loki/Thor (Marvel)“
- If it's a crossover, include the fandom for all the generic characters: "Beorn (Tolkien)/Loki (Marvel)"
Freeforms/Additional Tags
This is the open-ended category!
Just try to make sure the tags refer to things other people might want to search for.
A short list of possibilities:
- genre (“Fluff“, “Hurt/Comfort“)
- tropes (“Case Fic“, “Amnesia“)
- kinks (“Breathplay“, “Bondage“)
- extra information about characters (“Asgardian Tony Stark“, “Toph Beifong Being Awesome“)
- or about pairings (“Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers“, "Married Miki Sayaka/Sakura Kyoko")
- the kind of AU you’re writing (“Alternate Universe – Historical“, “Alternate Universe – Circus“)
- the story’s location (“France (Country)“, “Aslan’s Country“).
As always, use full unambiguous names when referring to a character. "POV Melinda May", "POV May Grant (9-1-1 TV)", and "POV Aunt May Parker (Marvel)" are all canonical freeforms! The ambiguous "may pov" is unwrangled and unfilterable.
A note about what freeforms get canonized:
The official policy for many years has been, wranglers can canonize their fandom-specific freeforms, but nobody can canonize generic No Fandom freeforms without putting them through an Official Discussion and Approval Process.
More often than not, we don't have a functional Process. When I last updated this in 2017, we didn't.
We ran one a few times in 2024. (This is why we finally have a COVID-19 canonical.) You can see the results of all three rounds in this March 2024 post, this April 2024 post, and this January 2025 post. As I write this paragraph in 2025, it's not running anymore.
Long story short, in most cases, the best way to make your fic findable is: choose an existing canonical. You can find these via the tag search.
You can also use a tag that's synned to an existing canonical. For example, “Yearning" and "Longing" are both synned to "Pining." If you use any of those tags, your work will be findable -- all the results will end up in the "Pining" filter.
If the term you want hasn't been canonized or synned, try looking for other words that mean the same thing, see if they have been. For example, as I write this, "Lewd" is not filterable -- but "Sexy" and "Filthy" and "Smut" all are.
How To Avoid Creating “Unwrangleable” Tags
- Don’t use long, meandering, idiosyncratic tags (“Tumblr-style tags”). If you want to say “Dylan is very bitter and very messed up but we all love him anyways,” or “I have so many headcanons and feelings in general for modern!Les Mis,” or “someone I know really wanted me to make this,” put it in the summary or author’s notes.
- Don’t put your tags in the wrong categories. Wranglers can’t re-categorize “Blaine Anderson – Relationship” or “Brittany Pierce – Freeform” or “Jasper Hale/Alice Cullen – Character“.
- One topic per freeform tag! Combinations like “A little fluff plus a little angst plus a lot of humor” will never be filterable, but “Angst”, “Fluff”, and “Humor” all are. On the flip side, a tag like “or something” is only half a topic, and is meaningless on its own.
- One character per character tag. One relationship per relationship tag. Otherwise you create Frankentags, such as “SasukexOC NarutoxHinata SakuraxSasuke” or “Seras Victoria. Alucard (Hellsing)“. Wranglers have no way to break those up.
There are very few situations where AO3 will officially make you change a tag. The system won't stop you from creating a Frankentag, or putting a character in the Relationship field, or making a very obvious typo, or anything else that might make your work harder to find. You have to do your own double-checking.
(The Terms of Service FAQ about tagging, as updated November 2024, mentions "If you believe a work's tags are misleading, then we encourage direct, polite conversation with the creator." So another user might catch it and point it out to you! But don't count on it.)
And that’s that! Do all of the above, and you will have elegant, searchable, AO3-standardized tags — and cut down on wrangler workload while you’re at it.
Wait, I Still Have Questions!
For more tag help, try the following:
- Look at the tag wrangler guidelines, available in the AO3 FAQs. These cover most of the special cases you’re likely to run into. (What to do with a canonical AU version of a character? How about a commonly-used fanon character? How do you format a relationship with an OC? Etcetera.)
- Contact Support and Feedback with questions, general tagging comments, and any errors you’ve spotted (e.g., character tags in your fandom that should be filterable, but aren’t yet). Support will work out an answer, with help from the appropriate people in the Tag Wrangling team.
- Ask somewhere unofficial, like filter-me-ao3 on Tumblr or an AO3 thread at fail_fandomanon. These places aren't endorsed or guaranteed by the AO3, but the answers can be fast and helpful.
- Leave a comment here. If I don't know the answer, I'll track down someone who does.