Why link previews matter
When your URL is pasted into Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, or X, the platform generates a preview card from your Open Graph tags. Get them right and your link looks professional and clickable; get them wrong and it shows a broken image, a truncated title, or content scraped from the wrong part of the page. Since that card is often the only thing a person sees before deciding to click, it’s worth auditing — this tool previews how the share will render across platforms and scores your tag setup.
The tags that drive the card
| Tag | Controls |
|---|---|
og:title | The headline of the card |
og:description | The supporting line |
og:image | The preview image (1200×630) |
og:url | The canonical link |
twitter:card | Twitter’s layout (summary_large_image) |
Twitter falls back to OG tags when its own aren’t present, so at minimum add twitter:card; everything else can ride on Open Graph.
Caches are why your update “didn’t work”
Platforms cache previews aggressively — Facebook for roughly a month, others for days. So after you fix your tags, the old preview can persist, making it look like nothing changed. The fix is to force a re-scrape through each platform’s debugger (Facebook Sharing Debugger, LinkedIn Post Inspector), and optionally add a ?v=2 cache-buster to the og:image URL. Always re-scrape after editing OG tags.
Audit before you publish
Use the Parse HTML mode to paste a page’s <head> and get a full report: which OG, Twitter, and standard meta tags are present, a score out of 100, and specific warnings (title too long, missing image, no canonical). This is the fast way to catch problems before a page goes live and gets shared with a broken card. To generate the tags in the first place, pair this with the Meta Tag Generator. Everything runs locally — the tool works on the markup you provide and makes no external requests.