Free tool · no signupFacebook link preview checker
Paste any URL to see the card Facebook will render and the Open Graph tags its crawler reads to build it. Facebook was the platform Open Graph was invented for, and it is still the strictest about og:url.
How Facebook renders a link
Facebook shows a large image card: the image on top at 1.91:1, then the domain in small caps, the title in bold, and a single line of description. It reads og: tags exclusively and ignores Twitter Card tags entirely. The threshold that catches people is image size — anything under 600×315 gets rendered as a small thumbnail beside the text instead of a full-width card, and it will silently give up on images that are very large rather than resizing them for you.
Why the wrong preview keeps coming back
Facebook keys its cache on og:url, and that has a consequence most people discover the hard way: any two pages that share an og:url value share a preview. Copy a template across a site without updating the tag and every page on it embeds as whichever one Facebook scraped first. When you do fix the tags, Facebook keeps serving the cached card until you run the page through its Sharing Debugger and press Scrape Again, which is also the fastest way to see exactly what the crawler received.
Checking every platform at once instead? Use the full Open Graph checker, or read How to fix your Facebook link preview and Open Graph tags explained.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does Facebook show the wrong image for my link?
- Three usual causes. There is no og:image, so Facebook picked an image off the page for you. The og:image URL is relative or unreachable, so the crawler got nothing — og:image must be an absolute URL. Or Facebook cached an older version, in which case the Sharing Debugger will clear it.
- Why do several of my pages show the same preview?
- They are almost certainly sharing an og:url value. Facebook treats og:url as the identity of the page, so duplicate values collapse into one cached preview. Give every page its own og:url matching its canonical URL and the previews separate.
- What is facebookexternalhit?
- The user-agent Facebook's crawler identifies itself as. If your server, CDN, or bot protection blocks it, Facebook never receives your HTML and renders a bare link with no card. Worth checking when the tags look correct here but Facebook still shows nothing.
- Can I customize the preview for a link I did not publish?
- Not through Facebook. You cannot edit tags on someone else's page, and Facebook removed the ability to override a link preview at post time in July 2017 to curb the spread of false news, which also killed it in Hootsuite and every other partner tool. Sharing a Prelinq link works because the tags live on a page Prelinq hosts, and the visitor is forwarded to the original destination.