What are Open Graph tags?
They're the meta tags that decide what your link looks like when someone shares it — the title, description and preview image on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack and iMessage. No tags means no image and a cut-off title on every share anyone has ever made of your site. Flagged on 25 of the 28 real sites in our audit corpus. Check in 30 seconds: paste your URL into Facebook's Sharing Debugger and see what the world sees.
The audit checks this on every page it crawls — up to 25 pages — and names every offender in the report.
The definition, in plain English
og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type — that tell social platforms and chat apps exactly how to render a link preview card. When any of them is missing, the platform improvises: it guesses a title from the page, often finds no image at all, and shows a bare or broken-looking link. The five required tags are simple to add, and they change every future share of every page — including shares your customers make, which are referrals you never see happen.
What our engine actually checks
Rule core/og-tags · severity: warning · flagged on 25 of the 28 real audits behind our statistics page
The audit checks every crawled page for the three tags that do the visible work — og:title, og:description and og:image — and flags each missing one per page. Because most sites inherit head markup from a template, the finding usually lands as a site-wide pattern: one template without OG tags means every page built from it shares the hole.
In the corpus: 25 of 28 sites were missing at least one of the three, making this the third most frequent finding we generate. Small-business sites are the worst affected — DIY builders often skip the "social preview" fields entirely.
Why it matters, honestly sized
The cost is paid in the channel you can't measure: shares that convert worse. A link shared in WhatsApp or LinkedIn with no image and a random title looks like spam, and gets ignored or scrolled past — your customer's recommendation of you arrives looking broken. Nobody reports "I didn't share/click because the card was ugly", so the loss is invisible, but the mechanics are proven: image-bearing cards consistently earn meaningfully more engagement than bare links.
There's a secondary cost on paid and email too: most link previews inside email clients, CRMs and chat support tools read OG tags. The same five lines of HTML improve every one of those surfaces at once.
The fix, step by step
- Add the five required tags to your page head (or your template's head include):
og:title(under 60 characters),og:description(under 200),og:image(absolute URL, 1200×630px works everywhere),og:url(the canonical address) andog:type(websitefor pages,articlefor posts). - Most site builders have fields for this. WordPress SEO plugins (Yoast, Rank Math), Squarespace, Wix and Shopify all have "social sharing" or "social preview" settings per page — fill them; they write the tags for you.
- Make a proper share image. 1200×630 pixels, readable at thumbnail size, brand-consistent. One good default image for the whole site beats none; per-page images for money pages beat the default.
- Test with the debuggers. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector show the card and clear the platform's cache — without that, old previews stick around after you fix the tags.
- Then check your important pages one by one — home, services, pricing — since template-level gaps hide per-page overrides.
What the £7.99 report checks — and what it can't
Everything here that can be checked from outside your site is mechanical, and mechanical is checkable. Full disclosure: some of it isn't, and we say which. The report is the full 21-category audit — what it costs and how it compares to doing it yourself are on their own pages.
The mechanical half
Checked across up to 25 pages per audit, with every offending page named and the exact fix spelled out.
- og:title, og:description and og:image presence on every audited page
- per-page gaps that template-level checks hide
- the meta description fallback those platforms use when og:description is missing
- basic head hygiene in the same pass: title, description, canonical
— Not ours to claim
What no report sold from outside your site can do:
- The report verifies the tags exist and are populated — it doesn't design your share images or judge how compelling a card looks. Pair the fix list with one afternoon in Canva and your shares stop looking broken.
Fair questions, straight answers
Do Open Graph tags affect SEO or Google rankings?
Not rankings — Google doesn't use OG tags for search. Their entire job is link previews on social platforms and chat apps. (Twitter/X uses its own twitter:card tags but falls back to Open Graph when those are missing.) So treat this as conversion and referral hygiene, not SEO — which is also why our audit scores it as a warning, not an error.
What size should the og:image be?
1200×630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) is the safe standard that renders well on Facebook, LinkedIn and most chat apps. Keep the file under ~1MB in JPG or PNG, use an absolute URL (https://…, not a relative path), and make sure text on the image stays large enough to read at thumbnail size.
I added the tags but the preview still looks wrong — why?
Almost always cache. Platforms store previews aggressively; after changing tags, run the URL through Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector and click the scrape/refresh button. The second-most-common cause is a relative image URL, which platforms can't resolve.
What's the difference between Open Graph and Twitter Cards?
Same idea, two dialects: Twitter/X has its own twitter:card, twitter:title and twitter:image tags. But X falls back to Open Graph when its own tags are absent, so adding OG tags alone covers Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack, iMessage and X in practice. Dedicated twitter: tags are only worth adding when you want X-specific rendering.
See your site the way a share sees it.
Enter your URL and pay securely — your report PDF lands in your inbox in ~30 minutes,
with Open Graph tags, titles, descriptions and images checked page by page.