Why Your Link Preview Doesn't Match What's on the Page

The preview card isn't reading your visible page

When a link is shared on Facebook, X, LinkedIn or Slack, the platform's crawler doesn't render your page the way a visitor sees it — it fetches the raw HTML and reads a specific set of meta tags: og:title, og:description, og:image, and a handful of related Twitter Card tags. If those tags are missing, generic, or wrong, the preview card will look wrong even if the visible page content is perfect.

Why the preview can go stale

Most platforms cache what they find the first time they crawl a URL, sometimes for weeks, and generally don't re-check automatically just because the page's content (or its meta tags) later changed. This is why updating a page's title or image doesn't always update its share preview right away — the platform is often still showing what it cached from before.

Fixing a stale preview

Each major platform provides its own tool to force a fresh re-check: Facebook's Sharing Debugger, LinkedIn's Post Inspector, and X's Card Validator. Running a URL through the relevant tool triggers an on-demand re-crawl, which usually fixes a stale card immediately. If the image itself changed but the URL didn't, some platforms also need a cache-busting query string appended to the image URL, since they can cache the image file separately from the page's HTML.

Try it yourself

Our Social Share Preview tool lets you type in your intended title, description and image and see an approximation of the resulting card before you publish anything.