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This is the method I like best because it has more specific filtering but is slightly more complicated to use.

Finding the Tag Page

Clicking it will land you here. Enter the tag you want to find in the first field. If you are looking for fandom-specific tag you can enter the fandom in the ‘fandoms’ field.

If you are looking for a fandom tag, enter it in the ‘tag name’ search not the ‘fandoms’ search

You are going to want to click the category that best fits your search. Freeform is just additional tags.

The canonical button is whether or not the tag needs to be ‘canonised’.

TL;DR whether the tag is viewed as ‘offical’ on ao3. But that is a whole other thing.

Unless you are searching for something really specific then chances are its going to be canonised but if you can’t find the tag you want, go back, uncheck the box, and look again. Still no results? Try various wordings. Still no results? Ask me or search in google idk

I’m using found family as the example search because it covers all bases that i spoke of above + more that i will explain.

This method works for all tags such as Fandom, Relationship, Character. Filtering works based off those tags works the same.

The tag I want to find is the ‘found family’ tag so i enter that in the ‘Tag name’ field.

It’s an additional tag so I click on ‘Freeform’

I want to find the canonical/main tag so i click that as well

Searching found family + canonical didn’t bring up the tag we wanted, only specific fandom related tags + groups secret santas/whatever. So we would turn off canonical and search again.

This happens because the tag i am looking for is not listed as ‘found family’ instead it’s a different name so it doesn’t show up.

This now brings up a giant list of every single tag on the archive that involves the term ‘found family’. This is 70+ pages long which is bad cause most of these are used in only one fic and we still don’t have the specific tag we want. BUT there is a solution. Thanks to the volunteer tag wranglers on this site, all (most) tags with the same meaning will end up linking to the same ‘parent’ tag.

For example, i will click on the top tag and end up here.

In the little ‘mergers’ section you can see that it has been made a synonym of ‘Families of Choice’ This is the official found family tag. You are going to want to click on that and end up here.

This is the official tag page. It shows all tags on the archive that have been marked as having the same meaning. You’re going to want to care about the ‘Works’ button in the top right.

And you end up here:

This page shows every single fic that has the tag 'Families of Choice’ or one that links back to it.

The column on the right is now your best friend and will help you navigate this hell page of search results.

Filtering

← The full filter list

You use this list to filter the same way you would filter in a work search but with the addition of being able to exclude certain tags.

There are two main sections to it: Include and Exclude.

• Exclude will not show anything that you enter in there
• Include will show all works with the tags entered. For example: If you search for fluff and angst. It will ONLY show works with BOTH of those tags, not either/and. This is where being too specific can be counterintuitive sometimes.

You can also expand each of the options to see the most popular tags under the main tag you are filtering under i.e. Families of Choice.

For example: the most popular fandom for families of choice is marvel with ~8k fics

you can also make specific searches within the ‘search within results box’

for example: if you put ‘otp:true’ in, it will only show fics where that relationship tag is the only one tagged. Very useful if you don’t want background pairings or you like a smaller ship that appears in the background of other fics when you want them to be the central point of the fic

Example Search