Search4 min read
Link Preview Not Showing: The Ordered List of Causes
A link preview not showing is almost always one of six things. Here they are in order of likelihood, each with the check that confirms it.
A link preview not showing is almost never mysterious. It is one of six causes, and they are worth checking in this order because that is roughly how often each turns out to be the answer.
FreeMentioned in this article
Link Preview DebuggerWhat X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.The debugger fetches the URL once and renders the card as X, Facebook, LinkedIn and chat apps each draw it — which usually identifies the cause before you read any further.
1. A link preview not showing usually means no Open Graph tags
The most common cause by a distance. Platforms read
og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url from the page's <head>. With none of them, some platforms guess from the page content and others show nothing.The minimum set:
<meta property="og:title" content="Page title">
<meta property="og:description" content="One sentence.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/card.png">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">Full detail in Open Graph tags.
2. The image is unreachable or the wrong shape
The image URL must be absolute, publicly reachable, and not behind authentication or a hotlink protection rule. Platforms also enforce their own minimums — an image that is too small is ignored rather than scaled up.
1200×630 is the safe size everywhere. Sizes per platform are in social media image sizes.
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Social Image ResizerOne image, cropped to every size the networks actually use.3. The platform cached an older version
Platforms fetch a page once and cache what they find, sometimes for a long time. If you have just fixed the tags, the card you are looking at may predate the fix.
The remedy is platform-specific, and Facebook is the usual offender — Facebook link preview not updating covers forcing a re-scrape.
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Facebook Post PreviewWhere the feed cuts your post — and it is earlier with a photo attached.4. The crawler is blocked
Preview crawlers are bots, and anything that blocks bots blocks them: a
robots.txt rule, a firewall, a bot-protection service, or a server that only responds to browsers.A page that renders perfectly for you and returns nothing to a crawler is the classic version of this, and it is invisible from a browser. Fetching the URL through a preview tool, which requests it the way a platform would, is the check.
5. The content is rendered by JavaScript
Some preview crawlers do not execute JavaScript. If your tags are injected client-side, the crawler sees an empty head. Open Graph tags belong in the server-rendered HTML, always.
6. Redirects and canonical mismatches
A URL that redirects can lose its tags along the way, and an
og:url pointing somewhere other than the page itself confuses platforms that use it for deduplication. Share the final URL, and make og:url self-referencing.Why previews matter more than they look
A link card is the entire visual footprint of a shared URL. On every platform in this list, a post containing a link is competing against posts containing images and video, and the card is the only picture it gets.
Which makes the failure modes expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate:
- No card at all turns your post into a bare URL, which is the least clickable object
in any feed.
- A wrong image - the site's logo, a stock header, someone else's photograph - is
worse than no image, because it actively misrepresents the page.
- A stale card persists. Platforms cache, and a bad card can outlive several redesigns
of the page it describes.
The fix is cheap and permanent: get the tags right once, at the template level, so every page on the site produces a correct card without anyone thinking about it. That is a half-hour of work that improves every link anyone ever shares.
The check that settles it
Rather than guessing, fetch the page the way a platform does and compare what comes back with what you expect:
FreeMentioned in this article
Link Preview DebuggerWhat X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.If the debugger shows correct tags and a platform still shows a wrong card, the cause is caching — number three — and the fix is on that platform's side. Meta documents its sharing requirements in its developer documentation, and X documents its card formats in its own.
Related: Twitter image sizes for X for what the card actually displays, and LinkedIn image and document sizes for the LinkedIn variant.
Why is my link preview not showing?
Most often missing Open Graph tags, an unreachable image, or a cached older version of the page. Check in that order.
How do I refresh a link preview?
Each platform has its own re-scrape mechanism. Editing the page alone does not clear a cache that has already been populated.
Do I need Twitter card tags as well as Open Graph?
X falls back to Open Graph for most fields, but
twitter:card is worth setting explicitly so you get the large card rather than the small one.Why does the preview work on one platform but not another?
Different crawlers, different caches and different image requirements. A tool that renders all of them from one fetch shows you which is which.
See what every platform actually reads from your URL: link preview debugger.
Put it to work
Tools for the job you just read about
Free to run, most of them without an account.
FreePreviews
Link Preview Debugger
What X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.
Preview the URL →26 runs
FreeImages & video
Social Image Resizer
One image, cropped to every size the networks actually use.
Resize →5 runs
FreePreviews
Facebook Post Preview
Where the feed cuts your post — and it is earlier with a photo attached.
Preview →3 runs
FreeContent
Jargon & Acronym Detector
The words that make sense to you and not to whoever just arrived.
Detect →
FreeContent
Sentence Rhythm Analyzer
Why a draft with nothing wrong with it still reads flat.
Analyze →
FreeContent
Crutch Phrase Finder
The phrases you use every time, which you are the last to notice.
Find →1 runs
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