Open Graph checker

What Open Graph is

Open Graph tags are lines in a page's <head> that tell sharing apps what to show when somebody pastes the link: a title, a short description, a picture and the page's address. Facebook created the protocol; WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage and most others read it, alongside the similar twitter: tags.

Not a Google ranking factor

Worth saying plainly, because it saves wasted effort: none of this moves you in Google. Google's documentation lists og:title only as one of the places it may take a result's title from (Google: title links). What Open Graph decides is how your link looks everywhere else it is shared — which is often where a new visitor first meets you.

The faults worth knowing about

• The four core tags. og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url. LinkedIn lists all four as required.
• An image address that is not a full URL. The protocol defines it as one beginning https://; apps do not promise to work out the rest.
• An image that does not load. We fetch it the way the audit's image check does and say what it answered.
• Tags outside the head. A stray element in the head ends it early, and WhatsApp says the tags must be inside it.
• Template text nobody filled in. {{title}} or undefined, posted by everyone who shares the page.
• og:url pointing elsewhere. Facebook counts shares at og:url, so it should match the page's canonical.

We read the HTML the server sends, before any script runs — which is also what most sharing apps read.

Next: preview the Google snippet, or check the canonical.