Instagram starts quietly removing the Places tab from Search

Some Instagram users have noticed that the Places tab, once a part of the search experience, has now disappeared. It was a quick way to explore locations, restaurants, or travel spots, and you could search for relevant places based on keywords.

I’ve checked for this change myself on Android and iOS. Sure enough, the Places tab doesn’t appear whenever I type a location in the search bar. Along with the tab, the dedicated filter for locations has also been removed.

A post on Reddit highlights that the Places tab is no longer there, and users are speculating whether this is the end of the “Locations” feature on the platform. While the feature has been glitchy since 2025, with only broader city/street tags working properly, the Places tab doesn’t exist anymore for many users.

Users are annoyed and frustrated about losing this feature. It was used for discovering places and travel planning; without it, they’ll have to manually search for videos of places and hope for the best.

One Reddit comment suggested a clunky fix. You can go to someone’s tagged story and move the map around from there, which is not as seamless. You could also try searching using hashtags, but it’s not the same.

Since Instagram didn’t issue an official statement on the removal of this feature, we’re left speculating on whether this is actually a full removal, a phased A/B test, or a bug.

I was unable to find comments online that confirm they still have the Places tab, but the lack of an announcement makes it difficult to conclude that it’s entirely gone. I’m assuming that the Places tab might be slowly phased out in favour of the Instagram Maps feature.

If there’s sufficient attention about the removal of this feature, the company could consider bringing it back, so we’d recommend reporting the missing feature directly to Instagram.

We’ll keep the post updated in case there are any further developments.

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