What are Open Graph tags?

Open Graph tags, explained

The Open Graph protocol was created by Facebook to turn web pages into rich objects in a social graph. Today almost every platform that shows link previews reads it: LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp, and X as a fallback. The spec at ogp.me lists four required properties: og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url, the canonical URL used as the page's permanent ID.

Useful optional ones include og:description, og:site_name and og:locale. Images have structured properties: og:image:width, og:image:height and og:image:alt, a description of what's in the image, not a caption. Tags use the property attribute rather than name, and live in the page head.

Open Graph isn't a Google ranking factor, but it matters for search-adjacent reasons. Google's image guidance mentions og:image as one way to indicate a page's preferred image, and its title link docs list og:title among the sources it may use. More directly, a good preview decides whether people click your link when it's shared in a launch post, a community or a DM.

Most frameworks let you set these in one metadata helper. Give every page a unique title and description, a default share image, and per-page images for important pages. Check previews after deploys, because platforms cache them and a broken image can stick for days.

Why it matters for founders

Launch day means your link gets shared everywhere. A blank or broken preview costs clicks you'll never see in analytics.

Example

Your launch link shows a random logo crop in Slack. You add a 1200×630 og:image with the product name and tagline, set og:title and og:description, and previews look right everywhere.

Common mistakes

• Missing og:image, so platforms pick a random image.
• Relative image URLs that platforms can't fetch.
• The same title and image on every page.
• Using name= instead of property= for og tags.