LinkedIn Preview & Card Checker

A LinkedIn preview is the card LinkedIn builds when a page URL lands in a post or a message. For a normal web page it reads Open Graph tags. It does not treat your Twitter card tags as a backup plan. Social sharing on LinkedIn is that card, not the article layout you spent the week on.

The estimate worth trusting first is generated from the HTML just retrieved. It is not LinkedIn's renderer. The post composer can still be showing an older card after you have already fixed the page.

Check the live URL before you post. This is for people who put a public link in front of a professional audience. If the URL will never leave your own browser, you can skip it.

What a LinkedIn preview reads

Paste the link and read the tags before trusting the composer. OG Scope's LinkedIn preview uses the same core fields other networks use: og:title, og:description, and og:image. og:site_name is worth setting when you want a clear site name.

It avoids relying on the product to infer the name from the domain.

<meta property="og:title" content="Field notes from a wet week" />
<meta property="og:description" content="What changed on the page, in two lines, without the site name." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/covers/field-notes.webp" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Field Notes" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/blog/field-notes" />

The image line is a <meta property="og:image"> tag. Pair the title and image with og:url for the canonical address and og:type for an article or website. og:type is not what makes this card. The image URL is.

The og:title should name the page. Titles that describe the piece beat titles that repeat the site name.

"Field Notes | Studio" belongs in a browser tab. "Field notes from a wet week" belongs on the card. If the only headline available is the brand, the post looks like an ad for the homepage. The guide to writing og:title has length advice and examples by page type.

og:description has to stand on its own. The reader may never open the page. Two lines that make sense with zero extra context beat a sentence that only works after the click. Do not drop a pile of phrases into that field and call it done.

The Open Graph image on this card is the file named by og:image. It must be an absolute https URL that returns the picture without a login. A file behind an account, a relative path, or a link that expires becomes a text-only share.

For OG image size, 1200 x 627 or 1200 x 630 is a solid default. Keep the subject near the center, because the crop will not honor a clever edge.

The Open Graph tags LinkedIn tends to honor are the title, description, image, and the site name when it is set. Those belong in the first HTML response. The other tags can be tidy and still leave the picture blank.

The preview inside the composer is a convenience, and it can be stale. When the title, description, or image on the card is wrong, start in the HTML, not in the post box, and read the published markup with a preview tool. A link sent in a chat app is a separate case: the guide to the WhatsApp link preview covers how that card is built and kept.

A Twitter image does not count

Twitter card tags are not a substitute. If you set only twitter:image, LinkedIn will not use it as the link image. A Twitter preview can look complete while this card has no picture. Read how twitter:image fallbacks work before you treat that Twitter preview as proof. A Twitter card checker will not catch the miss, because it is not applying LinkedIn's rule.

Set the og image to a public file. Then confirm that file loads. An OG image checker is the right place for a relative URL, a timeout, or a picture that is far too small. The LinkedIn card will not repair a broken file for you.

Tags that appear only after JavaScript runs are a second trap. Most crawlers do not execute the app. If the tags exist only in the browser, both the estimate and LinkedIn can miss them. Put them in the first response.

The composer lags behind the HTML

LinkedIn caches previews. After you change a tag, the post box can keep the previous card until LinkedIn fetches the URL again.

The estimate on the checker page is only the HTML just retrieved. Use it to see what you published. Use a fresh draft when you need a hint of what LinkedIn stored. They may disagree, and their disagreement reflects cache, not a second opinion about your markup.

That is also why they labeled the estimate as an estimate. It does not communicate with LinkedIn, and it does not affiliate with LinkedIn. A social media preview inside the product can sit on yesterday's image while your source is already correct. If the estimate is right and the composer is wrong, stop rewriting the title.

An Open Graph preview is where you review every tag, not only the three on the card. An Open Graph checker or an Open Graph debugger does that wider read when a plugin and a template are both printing headlines.

A meta tags analyzer lists the document title, canonical link, robots rules, and social tags in one pass, with a URL box. Use it when you cannot tell which og:title won. The image checker is the one to open when the image URL is the only hole.

LinkedIn's Post Inspector is the official page for asking LinkedIn to read a URL again. The facebook debugger will not clear a LinkedIn cache. A Facebook link preview can be current while LinkedIn is not. They do not share a refresh button. Scraping one network and expecting the other to follow is how people "fix" the same URL three times.

A search snippet can be a clean sentence and still be the wrong sentence for this card. Copy it into og:description only when the line works for a person who will not click. In the sample above, the card line is "What changed on the page, in two lines, without the site name." A results-page snippet that repeats the brand and a keyword list would echo og:title and waste that second line.

Metadata SEO stays split. The result page and the share card are different jobs.

The og data LinkedIn needs from you is small. Title, description, a public image URL, and a site name to make the brand explicit. Publish that, and ignore the urge to mirror every Twitter field into the head "just in case."

Before the post goes out

On the live URL:

• og:title names the page and does not merely repeat the site.
• og:description makes sense if nobody clicks.
• The image is absolute https, public, about 1200 x 630, subject in the center.
• You did not rely on twitter:image alone.
• The estimate matches that HTML.
• If the composer disagrees, you treated it as cache.

Then post. A LinkedIn preview can only be as current as LinkedIn's last fetch. Make that fetch worth keeping.

Frequently asked questions