SEO tools

Open Graph & Meta Tag Checker

Enter the address of a page and see the meta tags a crawler actually gets back: the title, the description, the canonical, the Open Graph set and the Twitter card, with a preview of the link card they produce a...

Why the answer has to come from a server

Every other tool here runs in your browser, and this one cannot. A page in your browser is not allowed to read the contents of a page on another site: the browser refuses the request unless the other site has explicitly opted in, which almost none do. So a checker that ran locally would work on a handful of sites and fail silently on the rest. This one asks our server to fetch the URL, and the server reads only the head of the document.

That fetch is deliberately narrow. It follows a small number of redirects, refuses anything that is not an ordinary public web address, stops after a fixed number of bytes so a huge page cannot tie it up, and extracts a fixed list of tag names. Nothing else about the page is read, stored or shown, and the response you get back is the tag list rather than the page.

What "missing" means for each tag

A missing og:image is the one people notice, because the shared link renders as a bare line of text and gets ignored. A missing og:title is usually harmless, since most networks fall back to the page title, but it means you have no control over what the card says. A missing description is the same trade in a search result: something will be shown, and it will be a sentence a machine picked out of your page.

A missing canonical is the quiet one. It costs nothing on a site with one address per page and it costs real traffic on a site where the same page answers on several, because the ranking signal is split between them instead of pooled. If this checker reports no canonical, that is worth fixing before the image.

When the checker disagrees with your page

The commonest cause is that the tags are added by JavaScript after the page loads. A crawler reads the HTML the server sent, and so does this checker, so a tag written by a script at runtime is invisible to both even though it is plainly there in the browser inspector. Framework applications that render on the client hit this constantly, and the fix is to have the server emit the tags, not to reorder the script.

The second cause is caching on the other side. Social networks store what they fetched and do not re-read your page on every share, so a corrected tag can take a while to appear in a real preview even though this checker already reports the new value. Most networks publish a way to force a re-fetch of a single URL.

How to use it

  1. Enter a URL

    Paste the full public address of the page you want to check, including https://.

  2. Read the tags

    See the title, description, canonical, Open Graph and Twitter card tags the page actually returns, with a preview of the card they produce.

  3. Fix what is missing

    Take the list of missing tags to the meta tag generator, paste the result into your page head, and check it again.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Open Graph checker free?
Yes, free and with no sign-up. Requests are rate limited per visitor so the fetcher stays available for everyone.
Does this upload anything of mine?
No. You give it a public URL and our server fetches that URL. Nothing of yours is uploaded, and the page we fetch is read for a fixed list of tag names and then discarded.
Why does it say no tags were found on a page that has them?
Almost always because the tags are added by JavaScript after load. Crawlers read the HTML the server sent, which is what this reads too, so tags written at runtime are invisible to both.
Can it check a page behind a login or on my laptop?
No. It fetches as an anonymous visitor on the public internet, so a page behind a password, on a private network or on localhost cannot be reached.
I fixed a tag but the preview on a social network has not changed.
Networks cache what they fetched. This checker reads your page live, so if it shows the new value the page is correct; use the network's own re-fetch tool to clear its copy.
What do I do with what it finds?
Use the meta tag generator to build the block of tags you are missing, paste it into your page head, and re-check.