OG Image Checker

Analyze Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags for any URL. Preview how your content appears when shared on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and other social platforms.

Enter a URL above to check its social media preview

If you have not actually fetched your own Open Graph tags as Facebook sees them, you do not know what they say.

The dirty secret of Open Graph is that nobody validates it until something goes wrong. You add og:image, you ship the page, you assume Facebook and LinkedIn will pull a clean preview, and three months later somebody on Slack sends you a screenshot of your blog post showing a generic favicon and the wrong title. By then the URL is cached, half your social traffic is gone, and you are scrambling through the Facebook Sharing Debugger trying to figure out why your image:width attribute was ignored. The OG checker is the dull, unglamorous step that prevents this exact failure mode.

What it actually does is fetch your URL the same way Facebook's crawler does — sending the facebookexternalhit user agent, ignoring JavaScript, and parsing only the rendered HTML head. It pulls every og:* and twitter:* tag, validates the image dimensions and aspect ratio, checks that the URLs are absolute and HTTPS, and renders the preview each platform will show. If your og:image is a 300x300 logo that Facebook will reject, it tells you. If your twitter:card is set to "summary" but your image is sized for "summary_large_image," it flags that too.

The thing most people get wrong is assuming OG tags work like HTML — that the browser will figure it out. Social crawlers are stricter than browsers. They require absolute URLs, they refuse to follow client-side redirects, they cache aggressively (Facebook's edge cache holds previews for up to 30 days), and they ignore tags they consider malformed. A trailing space in og:image, an http: URL on an https: site, an og:type of "blog" instead of "article" — any one of these can quietly break the preview without throwing an error.

The other failure mode is the staging-vs-production mismatch. Your dev environment had og:url set to localhost, somebody committed it, and now production is serving previews that point Facebook back to a private IP. The checker catches this by validating that og:url matches the canonical URL of the page and that both resolve to publicly fetchable HTTPS endpoints. It is the kind of check that sounds paranoid until it has saved you twice.

Run the checker after every meaningful change to a page's head — new image, new title, new template — and especially after CMS upgrades. Pair it with our /tools/meta-generator if you are creating the tags from scratch, and use our /tools/character-counter to confirm the OG title actually fits in a LinkedIn feed card before you ship.

When the OG Image Checker is the right tool

Right before a major content launch

Validate the preview on staging or a draft URL so you find missing og:image errors before the marketing team starts sharing the link in DMs.

After a CMS or theme update

Themes love to silently change what they emit in the head. A WordPress update or a Shopify theme refresh can swap your OG image for a placeholder without warning.

Debugging "my LinkedIn preview is wrong"

LinkedIn caches OG data for seven days and provides almost no tooling to inspect it. The checker shows you exactly what LinkedIn fetched, which is the first step in fixing it.

Auditing pages that rely on dynamic OG images

If you generate og:image at request time (Vercel OG, Satori, Cloudinary), the checker confirms the image actually returns a 200 with a valid content-type, not a 404 or a slow render.

Spot-checking competitor pages

Run a competitor URL through the checker to see what they ship — image dimensions, card type, fallback handling. Half of social marketing is copying what works.

How to use the OG Image Checker

Validate every og: and twitter: tag and preview the social card.

Enter your page URL

Submit the URL whose Open Graph and Twitter tags you want to audit.

Review the parsed tags

See each og: and twitter: tag value, with warnings for missing or duplicate fields.

Compare platform previews

Confirm Facebook, X, and LinkedIn all render the card you intend.

Mistakes we see all the time

Using a relative URL for og:image

Facebook does not resolve relative URLs. og:image must be an absolute HTTPS URL or the preview falls back to whatever asset the crawler can scavenge from the page.

Forgetting to set og:image:width and og:image:height

Without the dimensions, Facebook has to fetch and decode the image just to figure out if it qualifies for a large card. On slow image hosts, this can push the crawler past its timeout, and the preview silently degrades.

Setting twitter:card to "summary" when you have a 1200x630 image

Twitter renders "summary" as a small square card. If you went to the trouble of designing a wide image, use "summary_large_image" or the work is wasted.

Not testing after deploying a CDN or image proxy change

Image proxies sometimes return WebP or AVIF formats that Facebook's older crawler does not parse. The checker catches this because it tests the URL with the actual Facebook user agent.

OG Image Checker — Frequently Asked Questions

What does the OG checker test?

It fetches your Open Graph and Twitter card meta tags and renders the preview each platform shows.

Does it bust the Facebook scraper cache?

Yes. The tool fetches fresh metadata so you see the live tags rather than a stale Facebook cache.

What og:image dimensions should I use?

1200×630 is the safe target — wide enough for Facebook, X, and LinkedIn without cropping.

Why does my preview look right on Twitter but wrong on Facebook?

Different crawlers, different rules. Twitter falls back to OG tags if twitter:* tags are missing, but Facebook does not look at twitter:* tags at all. If your Twitter preview is fine and Facebook is broken, the most likely cause is a malformed og:image or a missing og:type — both of which Twitter is more forgiving about.

Does Twitter still read OG tags as fallback?

Yes. When twitter:title, twitter:description, or twitter:image are missing, Twitter (now X) falls back to the corresponding og: tag. This is why "just set OG tags" works for most basic Twitter previews. You only need separate twitter:* tags when you want a different image or a different card type than your OG block specifies.

How do I clear LinkedIn's OG cache?

LinkedIn provides a Post Inspector at linkedin.com/post-inspector that lets you re-scrape a URL. There is no automatic cache-bust like Facebook's Sharing Debugger, and the cache typically holds for seven days. If you need an urgent update, change the URL (add a UTM parameter) so LinkedIn treats it as a new resource.

What is the minimum og:image size that Facebook accepts?

Facebook requires at least 200x200 pixels to render any preview, and at least 1200x630 to render the large card format. Images smaller than 600x315 will fall back to the small square card regardless of og:image:width. Aim for 1200x630 every time unless you have a specific reason not to.

Why does my preview show an old image even after I updated og:image?

You are seeing the social platform's edge cache. Facebook caches for up to 30 days, LinkedIn for ~7 days, Twitter for ~7 days. To force a refresh, run the URL through Facebook's Sharing Debugger (or our /tools/og-checker, which busts the Facebook cache as part of the test). LinkedIn and Twitter require their own respective inspectors.

Do I need og:locale if my site is English-only?

No. og:locale defaults to en_US when omitted. Set it explicitly only if your site is in another language or you serve multiple locales, in which case og:locale and og:locale:alternate become important signals for which preview to show in which feed.

Can I serve different OG tags to crawlers than to users?

Technically yes — user-agent sniffing on the server lets you do it. Practically, do not. Cloaking the head for crawlers violates Facebook's and Twitter's terms of service, and Google's spam policies treat it as a deception signal. If you need a different preview, change the page, not the crawler response.

Open Graph is invisible until it breaks, and when it breaks it costs you real social traffic that is almost impossible to win back. Treat the checker the way you treat a linter — boring, mandatory, and the cheapest insurance you have against shipping a broken preview to thousands of feeds.