Open Graph Checker
Enter a live URL to read its Open Graph tags the way a social scraper does, then see what Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Slack and Discord will each build from them. The card image is requested, not just read.
Short answer
An Open Graph checker fetches a URL and reads the og: meta tags out of the HTML the server returned, which is exactly what a social scraper does. Four tags decide the card: og:title and og:description for the text, og:image for the picture, and og:url for the address shares are attributed to. The tag that matters most is og:image, because LinkedIn and Slack render a bare link with no card at all when it is absent. Reading the tags is only half the job. A tag pointing at an image that 404s renders identically to having no tag, so this tool also requests the image and reports the status and content type, alongside the redirect chain and any disagreement between og:url and rel=canonical.
The tags are invisible until someone shares the page
Nothing about a page looks wrong when its Open Graph tags are missing. The page renders, it ranks, it converts. The failure only appears in someone else's timeline, which is why these tags go stale quietly and why the problem is usually discovered by a colleague pasting a link into Slack. They are also easy to confuse with the tags that do affect search: a title tag and a meta description are what Google reads, and the og: equivalents are what everyone else reads. Our SEO checklist for blog posts covers both in the order you should set them.
| What is missing | What the card does | Who notices |
|---|---|---|
| og:image | LinkedIn and Slack render a bare link. No card at all | Everyone. This is the largest single click-through loss |
| og:title | Falls back to <title>, brand suffix and all | Anyone reading "… | Company Name" in a feed |
| og:description | Falls back to the meta description, or renders blank | Facebook and Slack, which both show a body line |
| og:url | Shares accumulate separately per query string | Nobody, until the share counts are split across five URLs |
| twitter:card | X and Discord render a small thumbnail rather than a wide image | Anyone sharing on X, which is most launches |
| og:image:alt | The card is unreadable with a screen reader | The people your card excludes |
Reading the tag is not the same as checking the image
Most Open Graph checkers parse the HTML and stop, which answers whether a tag exists and not whether it works. Those are different questions, and the gap between them is where the real failures live.
- A relative path such as /images/card.png is legal HTML, resolves in a browser, and resolves on no social platform. It has to be the full absolute URL
- A URL ending in .png that returns an HTML error page passes every regex-based checker and renders no image anywhere
- An image behind authentication, or on a host that blocks unfamiliar user agents, is unreachable to a scraper even though it loads for you
- An image over roughly 5 MB is refused by X and Facebook, which render the card with no picture rather than resizing it
- An image served over http on an https page is refused by some platforms as mixed content
What this tool does about it
It requests the image URL and reports the status code, the content type and the size. A HEAD request first, because that is what a scraper does, then a ranged GET when the host refuses HEAD, since plenty of CDNs return 405 to a method they still serve perfectly. Reporting a CDN quirk as a broken image is the kind of false positive that gets a tool ignored, which is the same reason the external link checker treats 403 and 429 as bot-blocked rather than broken.
One set of tags, five different renderings
Every platform reads the same tags and none of them renders the result the same way. The limits below are observed render widths rather than documented maximums, which is the number that matters: nothing rejects a long title, it just disappears mid-word.
| Platform | Title cuts near | Description | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 88 characters | About 200 characters | Caches on first scrape. Sharing Debugger can force a re-scrape | |
| X | 70 characters | About 125 characters | Needs twitter:card for a wide image. No way to clear the cache since 2022 |
| 119 characters | Dropped entirely in the feed | Title and image do all the work. Post Inspector re-scrapes | |
| Slack | 75 characters | About 190 characters | Left-bar unfurl. No image means a bare link |
| Discord | 82 characters | About 190 characters | Reads twitter:card to decide whether the image is wide |
The practical rule
Write to the shortest limit that matters to you. A 70-character title renders whole everywhere; a 110-character title is complete on LinkedIn and cut on the other four. The Open Graph preview draws each of these cards so you can see where the cut lands.
How to check the Open Graph tags on a page
Six steps, ordered so the failures that remove the card entirely come before the ones that only trim it. The tool runs all six.
- 01
Fetch the page the way a scraper does
Social platforms read the HTML your server returns to an anonymous request. Not the rendered DOM, not what you see logged in. Anything a scraper cannot reach in that one response does not exist as far as a link card is concerned.
- 02
Check og:image before anything else
It is the tag whose absence costs the most. LinkedIn and Slack render a bare link with no card at all when it is missing, which is the single biggest click-through loss on the list.
- 03
Prove the image URL actually resolves
A tag pointing at a 404 renders identically to no tag. The URL has to be absolute, has to return an image content type, and has to be under the platform size ceilings.
- 04
Read the title and description at each platform's width
X cuts a title near 70 characters, Facebook near 88, LinkedIn near 119. LinkedIn drops the description entirely in the feed. One string is rendered five different ways and only the shortest limit really binds.
- 05
Reconcile og:url with rel=canonical
When they disagree, share counts accumulate against one address and ranking signals against the other. They should be the same absolute URL, and it should be the one that does not redirect.
- 06
Check it before the first share, not after
Facebook caches on first scrape and X holds for about a week. Getting it right after the launch post has gone out fixes it for nobody who saw it.
Run it again after any template or CMS change. Open Graph tags are written by layouts rather than by authors, so a component that stops emitting og:image strips the card from every page using it at once, and nothing on the pages themselves changes visibly.
What this tool checks
The four tags that matter
og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url, with what each platform does when one is absent
Card image loads
The URL is requested, so a valid tag pointing at a 404 is caught
Absolute URLs
Relative image paths, which are legal HTML and resolve on no platform
Image content type and size
A .png that returns HTML, and anything past the 5 MB ceiling
og:url against rel=canonical
The mismatch that splits share signals from ranking signals
Redirect chain
Where the URL resolved, and whether og:url points at the destination
Title and description widths
Measured against what each of the five platforms renders
twitter:card
The tag X and Discord need for a wide image, with no Open Graph fallback
og:image:alt
Whether the card is readable with a screen reader
Tags are read from the server response, not the rendered page
og:image on a page you know has one, that is the first thing to rule out. The page word counter reads the same server response, so a page that comes back thin there is usually client-rendered for the same reason.Frequently asked questions
What is an Open Graph checker?
It is a tool that fetches a URL, reads the og: meta tags out of the HTML the server returned, and reports what a social platform will build from them. Open Graph is the protocol Facebook introduced that almost every platform now reads, including LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and X. The tags decide the title, description and image on a link card. A checker matters because those tags are invisible on the page itself: nothing about the page looks wrong when they are missing, right up until someone shares it.
Which Open Graph tags actually matter?
Four do most of the work. og:title and og:description control the text, og:image controls the picture and is the one whose absence collapses the card entirely on LinkedIn and Slack, and og:url declares the canonical address that shares are counted against. og:site_name and og:type are worth setting and rarely cause visible problems. Everything else in the specification is for specific content types, such as articles, video and music, and most pages never need any of it.
Why is my Open Graph image not showing?
Usually one of four things. The URL is relative rather than absolute, which no platform resolves. The file 404s, or sits behind authentication, or is served by a host that blocks unfamiliar user agents. The image is over the platform size ceiling, commonly 5 MB. Or the correct tags went up after the page was first shared and the platform is still serving a cached scrape. This tool separates those cases by requesting the image and reporting the status code and content type rather than only confirming the tag exists.
What size should an Open Graph image be?
1200 by 630 pixels is the size that works everywhere. It is the ratio Facebook and LinkedIn render at, it satisfies the roughly 2:1 X wants for a large card, and it is comfortably above every documented minimum. Keep it under 5 MB, use PNG or JPEG, and keep important content away from the edges because different platforms crop differently. One image at that size is a better use of effort than separate assets per platform.
Do Open Graph tags affect SEO?
Not directly. They are not a ranking factor, and Google does not use og:title or og:description to build a search result: it uses the title tag, the meta description and the page content. What they affect is what happens after a link leaves search, which is the traffic from every share on every platform. A page with no og:image renders as a bare link in Slack and LinkedIn, and the click-through difference between a card and a bare link is large enough to matter on anything shared regularly.
Should og:url and rel=canonical be the same?
Yes, in almost every case. og:url tells a platform which address to attribute shares and engagement to, and rel=canonical tells a search engine which address to index. When they disagree you split the two signals across two URLs for the same page. The one exception is a page deliberately syndicated from elsewhere, where the canonical points off-site and og:url should still point at the copy people are sharing. This tool reports the mismatch rather than assuming which one is wrong.
Can Open Graph tags be added with JavaScript?
They can be written that way and it will not work. Social scrapers request the URL and read the HTML that comes back; they do not execute JavaScript the way a browser or Googlebot does. A tag injected at runtime is present in your browser's DOM inspector and absent from the response a scraper sees, which is exactly the case where the tags look correct to you and the card is blank. The tags have to be in the server response, which for a framework means rendering them server-side.
How do I clear a cached Open Graph card?
It depends on the platform, and it has become harder. Facebook still offers its Sharing Debugger with a Scrape Again button, and LinkedIn has a Post Inspector that does the same. X retired its validator in 2022 and now has no refresh mechanism at all, so a card there expires on its own after about a week. Because the tools differ per platform and one of them no longer exists, checking before the first share is the only approach that works everywhere.
What is the difference between this and the Open Graph preview?
This tool fetches a live URL, so it also verifies the things that only exist on the network: whether the image really loads, what the page redirects to, and whether og:url matches where the page actually resolved. The Open Graph preview takes markup you paste, which means it works on staging, on pages behind a login, and on tags you have written but not deployed, and it renders the visual card for each platform. Use the preview while writing tags and this one once the page is live.
Does this work on a page behind a login?
No, and neither does any social platform. The tool makes an anonymous request, so a page requiring authentication returns a login page and the tags read are whatever that page carries. That is not a limitation to work around: it is the same thing the scraper sees, so a gated page genuinely has no card. To check tags on a page you cannot expose publicly, paste the markup into the Open Graph preview instead.
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Check the tags on every page, not one URL at a time
A missing og:image almost always comes from a layout, which means it is missing on every page that layout renders. CrawlRaven crawls the site, records the Open Graph tags on every page, and joins them to Search Console so you can see which of the pages with no card are the ones people actually share.