Rich Link Preview Tester

What the rich Link Preview Tester does

Every platform builds its link preview slightly differently, and every one of them falls back to something when a tag is missing. This tester extracts the sharing tags from your HTML, shows what each platform will find, and renders the card that results — including the degraded version you get when the tags are absent.

The fallback chain is the part worth understanding. If og:title is missing, platforms use the <title> tag — which usually carries a | Brand Name suffix that is useful in a search result and wasted in a feed where the site name is already displayed. If og:description is missing, they use the meta description, written for a different audience. If both are missing, they scrape body text, and what they find first is often your navigation menu.

The image is the tag that matters most. Without og:image, X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slack all render a text-only card, and text-only cards are dramatically less likely to be clicked in a scrolling feed. The tool checks not only that the tag exists but that it is an absolute URL — a relative path is the most common reason an image tag is present and the card still comes out blank, because an external scraper has no base to resolve it against.

Two previews are shown because platforms split into two families. X, LinkedIn and Slack render a large card with the image above the text. WhatsApp and iMessage render a compact card with a small thumbnail beside it, where the title has far less room. Copy that works in one can be truncated to nonsense in the other.

How to use it

1. Paste the HTML of the page you are about to share.
2. Check the tags list for anything marked with an amber warning.
3. Look at both previews — the compact one truncates titles much earlier.
4. After fixing the tags and republishing, re-scrape the URL in each platform's own debugger to clear their cache.

A worked example

A page with only a title and meta description, and no Open Graph tags at all, produces:

✗ No image on any platform    Text-only card everywhere
! No og:title                 Falls back to "Best Running Shoes for Flat Feet in 2026 | Stride Lab"
! No og:description           Falls back to the meta description
! No og:url                   Tracking variants will not consolidate

The card that results shows the full title including the brand suffix, in a context where the site name already appears above it — so “Stride Lab” is displayed twice and the headline is truncated to make room. Adding four tags fixes all of it, and the largest single improvement is the image.

Frequently asked questions