Why does my preview look different from what I see on Facebook?

Facebook caches Open Graph data aggressively. If you have updated your tags recently, use Facebook's Sharing Debugger to clear their cache.

Does this fetch real data from the URL?

Yes. The tool makes a real HTTP request to the URL and parses the actual meta tags from the page.

What platforms are previewed?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, and Slack. Each platform has slightly different rendering rules and card formats.

Can I preview password-protected pages?

No. The tool can only fetch metadata from publicly accessible URLs.

paste a url. see the card.

preview how your link appears on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, and Slack. fetches real OG tags from any URL.

What this tool does

Paste any URL and see how it renders as a link preview on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, iMessage, and other platforms — pulling the page's actual Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata. Find missing tags, broken images, or title truncation before you publish.

What Open Graph actually is

Open Graph is a small set of HTML meta tags introduced by Facebook in 2010 to standardize how a page describes itself for social sharing. The core tags:

html

<meta property="og:title" content="Page title shown in the card" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Subtitle text under the title" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/preview.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />

When someone pastes the URL into Slack or LinkedIn or iMessage, the platform fetches the page, looks for these tags, and renders the card from them. No tags means no card — just a bare URL.

Why it almost always looks wrong on first try

A few specific failure modes account for 90% of broken OG previews:

Image too small. Most platforms require at least 600×315; many prefer 1200×630. Smaller images get rejected and the card falls back to a generic preview or no card at all.
Image is a relative URL. og:image must be absolute, with a full https:// protocol. Relative URLs (/preview.jpg) get rejected by every consumer.
Image behind authentication or CDN auth. The platform's scraper has to be able to fetch the image without credentials. Private S3 buckets and signed URLs that expire will break previews.
Cache lag. Most platforms aggressively cache OG metadata. Your fix may be live but the cached card lingers for hours or days. Facebook has a debugger (sharing.facebook.com/debug) that forces a re-scrape; LinkedIn has post-inspector.linkedin.com. Slack and iMessage have no public debugger but generally re-scrape after a day or so.
JavaScript-rendered metadata. If your OG tags are injected client-side after page load, most scrapers will not see them. The metadata has to be in the initial HTML response.

Twitter Cards: a related but separate format

Twitter (now X) historically used its own metadata format (twitter:card, twitter:title, etc.) that overlaps with Open Graph. In practice, X falls back to OG tags when the Twitter-specific ones are absent, so most pages can skip the Twitter-specific tags entirely. The exception is twitter:card, which controls whether you get a small or large image card.

Title and description length

Title — most platforms display 60-90 characters. Longer titles get truncated with an ellipsis. Front-load the most important words.
Description — 100-200 characters. Truncation rules vary by platform; LinkedIn shows more than Twitter, which shows more than iMessage.

The single highest-leverage OG tag

The image. A page with a great image and weak text reads better in social feeds than a page with great text and a weak (or missing) image. If you only optimize one tag, optimize og:image.

How this tool works

Paste a URL and the tool fetches the page server-side (this is one of the few tools on Persimmon that does so — it has to, because OG fetching is exactly what it simulates). The resulting metadata is parsed and rendered in cards that match how each major platform actually displays it. The page you paste is the only thing fetched; no analytics, no profile-building, no logging beyond what is needed to return your result.