Pages and copy
Meta tag checker
This meta tag checker reads a page's title, description, canonical, robots, Open Graph and X card tags, previews how they may look in Google and in shared links, and writes new tags too.
Three previews
Google, an Open Graph share card and an X card, each marked approximate.
Sourced checks
Each check links to Google's or the platform's own documentation.
Generator too
Write the title, description, canonical, robots, Open Graph and X tags from a form.
Meta tag checker: what do your tags say?
Free, no sign-up. Enter an address and Convertica's server reads that one page, or paste the page source and it is read in your browser. Below is the result for a made-up page.
Paste the page source instead
Meta tags checked
6 to review
6 checks passed across Google, Open Graph and X.
Example result, for the made-up page in the worked example
example.com
www.example.com › blog › glaze-guide
Glaze Guide: How to Choose a Glaze for Stoneware | Example Pottery
No meta description: Google writes a snippet from the page text.
Image not loaded here
https://www.example.com/images/glaze-guide.png
EXAMPLE.COM
The Example Pottery glaze guide: how to choose a glaze for stoneware mugs
No og:description
Image not loaded here
https://www.example.com/images/glaze-guide.png
The Example Pottery glaze guide: how to choose a glaze for stoneware mugs
From example.com
Images are not loaded in these previews: this page loads images from convertica.org only. Each shows the image's address, and its size and type when the page is fetched by address.
Google search
- Pass Title: 66 characters. Google sets no length limit; it cuts a long title link to fit the screen. Google Search Central: title links
- Review No meta description. Google writes snippets mainly from the page text and sometimes uses the description when it describes the page better. Google Search Central: snippets and meta descriptions
- Review The canonical address is relative. Google recommends an absolute address, such as https://www.example.com/page/. Google Search Central: rel="canonical"
- Pass No robots meta tag, so the defaults apply: index and follow. Google Search Central: robots meta tag rules
- Pass Viewport meta tag present. Google says it indicates a page built for mobile. Google Search Central: meta tags that Google supports
- Note A keywords meta tag. Google does not use it for indexing or ranking, so it does no harm and no good. Google Search Central: meta tags that Google supports
Open Graph (Facebook, LinkedIn and others)
- Pass og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url are present, the four properties the Open Graph protocol requires. The Open Graph protocol
- Review No og:description. LinkedIn lists it among the og: tags that must exist. LinkedIn Help: make your website shareable on LinkedIn
- Review No og:image:alt. The Open Graph protocol says a page with og:image should describe it in og:image:alt. The Open Graph protocol
X card
- Pass Card type summary_large_image, one of the four X documents. X Developer Platform: getting started with cards (archived)
- Pass Every tag X's summary_large_image card reference marks as required is present (the title through og:title). X Developer Platform: summary card with large image (archived)
- Review twitter:title (read from og:title) is 73 characters; X's documented maximum is 70. X Developer Platform: cards markup (archived)
- Review No twitter:image:alt or og:image:alt. X uses it to describe the image to people who cannot see it. X Developer Platform: cards markup (archived)
Search tags
- Title
- Glaze Guide: How to Choose a Glaze for Stoneware | Example Pottery (66 characters)
- Meta description
- Not found
- Canonical
- https://www.example.com/blog/glaze-guide/
- Robots
- No robots meta tag (index, follow)
- Viewport
- width=device-width, initial-scale=1
- Character set
- utf-8
Open Graph tags
- og:title
- The Example Pottery glaze guide: how to choose a glaze for stoneware mugs
- og:description
- Not found
- og:image
- https://www.example.com/images/glaze-guide.png
- og:image:alt
- Not found
- og:url
- https://www.example.com/blog/glaze-guide/
- og:type
- article
- og:site_name
- Not found
X card tags
- twitter:card
- summary_large_image
- Title
- The Example Pottery glaze guide: how to choose a glaze for stoneware mugs (from og:title)
- Description
- Not found
- Image
- https://www.example.com/images/glaze-guide.png (from og:image)
- Image alt text
- Not found
- twitter:site
- @examplepottery
- twitter:creator
- Not found
Short answer
A meta tag checker reads a page's title, meta description, canonical, robots, Open Graph and X card tags and says what each reader does with them. Convertica's free meta tag checker previews the page in Google, in an Open Graph share card and on X, and links every check to Google's or the platform's own documentation.
- Google sets no length limit for a title or a meta description. It cuts both to fit the screen, and it may rewrite them.
- The Open Graph protocol calls og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url required on every page.
- X reads its own twitter: tags first and falls back to the Open Graph tags, so one set of og: tags can feed both.
- Google ignores the keywords meta tag. It accepts a canonical link only in the head.
Meta tag generator
The meta tag generator writes the tags for one page from a short form: the title, the meta description, the canonical link, a robots tag when you need one, the Open Graph tags and the X card tags. It checks what it wrote with the same rules as the checker and shows the same three previews. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Write the tags
The fields hold a made-up page. Change any of them and the tags, checks and previews update as you type.
Tags written
Nothing to fix
8 checks passed across Google, Open Graph and X.
The tags, to paste into the page's head
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Handmade Stoneware Mugs | Example Pottery</title>
<meta name="description" content="Wheel-thrown stoneware mugs in six glazes, each one signed and dishwasher safe. See the sizes and glazes, then order online.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/mugs/">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:title" content="Handmade Stoneware Mugs | Example Pottery">
<meta property="og:description" content="Wheel-thrown stoneware mugs in six glazes, each one signed and dishwasher safe. See the sizes and glazes, then order online.">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.com/mugs/">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Example Pottery">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.com/images/mugs-share.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="Three glazed stoneware mugs on a wooden shelf">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@examplepottery">Example Pottery
www.example.com › mugs
Handmade Stoneware Mugs | Example Pottery
Wheel-thrown stoneware mugs in six glazes, each one signed and dishwasher safe. See the sizes and glazes, then order online.
Image not loaded here
https://www.example.com/images/mugs-share.jpg
EXAMPLE.COM
Handmade Stoneware Mugs | Example Pottery
Wheel-thrown stoneware mugs in six glazes, each one signed and dishwasher safe. See the sizes and glazes, then order online.
Image not loaded here
https://www.example.com/images/mugs-share.jpg
Handmade Stoneware Mugs | Example Pottery
From example.com
Google search
- Pass Title: 41 characters. Google sets no length limit; it cuts a long title link to fit the screen. Google Search Central: title links
- Pass Meta description: 124 characters. Google sets no length limit; it cuts the snippet to fit the screen. Google Search Central: snippets and meta descriptions
- Pass Canonical: an absolute address in the head. Google Search Central: rel="canonical"
- Pass No robots meta tag, so the defaults apply: index and follow. Google Search Central: robots meta tag rules
- Pass Viewport meta tag present. Google says it indicates a page built for mobile. Google Search Central: meta tags that Google supports
Open Graph (Facebook, LinkedIn and others)
- Pass og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url are present, the four properties the Open Graph protocol requires. The Open Graph protocol
X card
- Pass Card type summary_large_image, one of the four X documents. X Developer Platform: getting started with cards (archived)
- Pass Every tag X's summary_large_image card reference marks as required is present (the title through og:title). X Developer Platform: summary card with large image (archived)
The generator leaves out twitter:title, twitter:description and twitter:image on purpose: X documents that it falls back to og:title, og:description and og:image, so one set of Open Graph tags feeds both. It writes a robots tag only for noindex or nofollow, because Google's defaults are index and follow and do not need to be stated.
How to check the meta tags on a page
To check a page's meta tags, read its HTML as it is sent, before any JavaScript runs, and look at the head: the title element, the meta description, the canonical link, the robots meta tag and the Open Graph and X card tags. The meta tag checker does that and tells you what each one does.
-
Enter the page or paste its source
Type the address and press "Check the tags". For a page on a staging server or behind a login, paste its source instead.
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Read the three previews
They show the text the tags give Google, a share card and an X card. They are approximations: each platform decides what it shows, and Google may write its own title link or snippet.
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Work through Fix, then Review
Each check is marked Fix, Review, Pass or Note, and links to the documentation it comes from. A check with no source is marked as advice.
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Ask each platform to read the page again
Platforms keep a copy of what they read. X says it caches card data for 7 days. After you change the tags, a link shared before the change can keep the old card for a while.
To check by hand, open the page, choose View Page Source and search for <title, name="description", rel="canonical" and og:. Tags that JavaScript adds after the page loads are not in that source, and not every reader runs JavaScript.
What does the meta tag checker read?
The meta tag checker reads the tags in a page's HTML that search engines and social sites read: the title, the meta description, the canonical link, the robots meta tag, the viewport, the character set, the Open Graph tags and the X card tags. Every rule it applies comes from the reader's own documentation, linked in the last column.
| Tag | What it does | Rule from |
|---|---|---|
<title> | The page's title. Google uses it, among other sources, for the title link in results. It sets no length limit | Google: title links |
meta name="description" | A summary Google sometimes uses for the snippet, when it describes the page better than the page text | Google: snippets |
link rel="canonical" | The address you prefer when several show the same page. Google accepts it only in the head and recommends an absolute address | Google: canonical |
meta name="robots" | Rules such as noindex, nofollow, nosnippet and max-snippet. Google ignores noarchive, nocache and nositelinkssearchbox | Google: robots meta tag |
meta name="viewport", charset | Google says a viewport tag indicates a page built for mobile, and recommends UTF-8 | Google: supported meta tags |
meta name="keywords" | Nothing, for Google: it does not use the tag | Google: supported meta tags |
og:title, og:type, og:image, og:url | The four properties the Open Graph protocol requires on every page, read by sites that build a preview of a shared link | ogp.me |
og:description, og:image:alt | LinkedIn lists og:description among the tags that must exist; the protocol says a page with og:image should give og:image:alt | LinkedIn Help, ogp.me |
twitter:card and the other twitter: tags | The X card type and its text and image, with the Open Graph tags as fallbacks | X cards markup (archived) |
When it fetches a page by address, the checker also reads the first bytes of each share image to give its pixel size, file type and file size, and reads robots.txt to say whether Twitterbot, the crawler X documents for its cards, may fetch the page.
Worked example: reading a result
The example result at the top of this page is for a made-up blog post at https://www.example.com/blog/glaze-guide/. Every name and word in it is invented to show how the checker reads a page. This is its source:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Glaze Guide: How to Choose a Glaze for Stoneware | Example Pottery</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="glaze, stoneware, pottery">
<link rel="canonical" href="/blog/glaze-guide/">
<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:title" content="The Example Pottery glaze guide: how to choose a glaze for stoneware mugs">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.com/blog/glaze-guide/">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.com/images/glaze-guide.png">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@examplepottery">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Glaze guide</h1>
</body>
</html>The checker finds nothing to fix and 6 things to review. The title is 66 characters, which passes: Google sets no limit, and the Google preview cuts it at the width of its box, the way Google cuts a title to fit the screen. There is no meta description, so Google would write the snippet from the page text. The canonical is the relative address /blog/glaze-guide/, and Google recommends an absolute one.
For sharing, the four required Open Graph properties are there, but og:description and og:image:alt are missing. The X card is summary_large_image. It has no twitter:title, so X falls back to og:title, which is 73 characters, over the 70 X documents for a card title. The keywords tag earns a note: Google does not use it.
How long should a title tag and meta description be?
Google sets no length limit for a title tag or a meta description. Its documentation says both are cut in search results as needed, typically to fit the device width. So the checker counts characters but never fails a title for its length. X and LinkedIn do publish figures for their own previews, and the checker applies those to their cards only.
| Where | Title | Description | Image | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google search result | No limit; cut to fit the screen | No limit; cut to fit the screen | Not applicable | Title links, snippets |
| X card | 70 characters | 200 characters | Under 5 MB; JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF; alt text up to 420 characters | X cards markup (archived) |
| LinkedIn share | Not published | Not published | At least 1200 x 627 pixels, up to 5 MB, 1.91:1 recommended | LinkedIn Help |
Since no published limit decides it for Google, decide by what the result has to do: name the page plainly, put the words a searcher typed near the start, and say in the description what the visitor gets. Google may still show other text. The headline analyzer checks a meta title's wording, and the guide to increasing click-through rate covers what makes a result worth clicking.
Open Graph preview: how a shared link gets its card
An Open Graph preview shows the card a site may build when someone shares your link. The site fetches the page, reads og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url, and draws a card from them. The checker's Open Graph preview is a plain card of that kind, not a copy of any one platform's design.
- Write the image address in full. og:image should start with https://. A relative address depends on where the reader thinks the page is.
- Describe the image. The Open Graph protocol asks for og:image:alt whenever there is an og:image.
- Size the image for the largest card you need. LinkedIn asks for at least 1200 x 627 pixels and shows images under 401 pixels wide as a thumbnail. X's summary_large_image card needs at least 300 x 157 at 2:1.
- Let X reuse it. X reads twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image and twitter:image:alt first and falls back to the Open Graph tags. Only twitter:card has no fallback you control.
For every X card rule in one place, use the Twitter card validator, which reads the same tags with X's fallbacks and checks the card image.
What this meta tag checker cannot tell you
This meta tag checker reads one page's HTML as it is sent. It cannot show what Google or a social platform will actually display, because each one decides that for itself.
- The real search result. Google says it chooses title links from several sources and writes snippets mainly from the page text, so the Google preview shows your tags, not Google's choice.
- The real card. Each platform has its own layout, crops and cache. The previews are plain approximations. X's own staff wrote in 2022 that they removed previews from X's Card Validator because they did not always match how cards appear, and pointed to the post composer instead.
- The images. This page loads images from convertica.org only, so the previews show each image's address, size and type rather than the picture.
- Tags added by JavaScript. A tag a script adds after the page loads is not in the HTML. Google warns against injecting meta tags with JavaScript where you can avoid it. The crawlability test compares the source with the rendered page.
- Structured data. JSON-LD is a separate layer; check it with the schema markup validator.
- Its own fetch. It sends a user agent that names Convertica, from Cloudflare's network, so a site that turns unknown fetchers away may block it: paste the source instead. It follows up to five redirects, waits 8 seconds per fetch and 20 in all, and allows 10 checks per 10 minutes per IP address.
What to do once the tags are right
Meta tags decide how a page is introduced, in a search result or a shared link. They win or lose the click. Whether the visitor then signs up or buys is up to the page, and a title that promises what the page does not deliver brings visits that leave.
- Match the promise. Make the page's headline and first screen say what the title and description said.
- Check what crawlers receive. The crawlability test shows the text, links and indexing signals in the HTML before JavaScript.
- Measure the page. The landing page analyzer scores one landing page, and the free CRO audit checks the page behind the tags.
See all free tools and how they fit together.
Meta tag checker FAQ
What is a meta tag checker?
A meta tag checker reads a page's HTML and reports the tags that shape how it appears in search results and in shared links: the title, the meta description, the canonical link, the robots meta tag, the Open Graph tags and the X card tags. This one also previews the result and says which source each check comes from.
How do I check the meta tags on a page?
Enter the page's address in the meta tag checker above and press Check the tags. To check by hand, open the page, choose View Page Source and search for <title, name="description" and property="og:. For a page on a staging server, paste its source into the checker instead.
How long should a title tag and a meta description be?
Google sets no length limit for either. Its documentation says a title link and a snippet are cut as needed to fit the device width. Write a title that names the page and a description that summarizes it, and put the words that matter first. X does set limits for its own cards: 70 characters for the title and 200 for the description.
Does Google always use my title and meta description?
No. Google says it uses several sources to choose a title link, and that snippets are made mainly from the page content, using the meta description when it describes the page better. A good title element and description make it more likely that Google shows what you wrote, but it decides.
Do meta keywords still matter?
Not for Google. Google's documentation says the keywords meta tag is not used by Google Search and has no effect on indexing or ranking. Leaving one in does no harm. The checker notes it so you know it is doing nothing for Google.
What are Open Graph tags?
Open Graph tags are meta tags, such as og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url, that tell social sites and messaging apps what to show when a link is shared. The Open Graph protocol calls og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url required. LinkedIn also asks for og:description.
Why does my shared link show the wrong image or title?
Usually because the og:image or og:title tag is missing, points to the wrong file, or the site that reads it has kept an old copy. X says it caches card data for 7 days. Check the tags here, fix them on the page, then use each platform's own tool to have it read the page again.
Is this meta tag generator free?
Yes, with no sign-up. The meta tag generator writes the title, description, canonical, robots, Open Graph and X card tags from the fields you fill in, checks them with the same rules as the checker and shows the previews. It runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Is the meta tag checker free, and where does my data go?
It is free, with no sign-up. An address you enter is sent to Convertica's server, which fetches the page, up to two share images and robots.txt, and returns the result. The address, the page and the result are not stored. It allows 10 checks per 10 minutes per IP address. A pasted source is read in your browser and not sent anywhere.
