Link preview checker

What the checker looks at

• The page's status code and redirects, as ShotvikBot sees them.
• og:title, og:description, og:image (with its declared size, type and alt text), og:url, twitter:card and the other twitter: tags, <title>, the meta description and the canonical link.
• The preview image itself: whether it loads, its real type, its pixel size and its file size, measured on our server from the first bytes of the file.
• Whether your robots.txt blocks the crawlers of LinkedIn, X or Facebook for this page.
• Where in the HTML your Open Graph tags are. Tags that come late in a large page can be missed.

The checker reads the static HTML only, without running JavaScript. That's also how the link preview crawlers we know of work, so tags that a script adds after loading are reported as missing.

Why is my WhatsApp link preview not showing?

Meta's WhatsApp link preview documentation (checked 4 October 2026) asks for these, and the checker tests each one:

• og:title, og:description, og:url and og:image in the <head>, within the first 300 KB of the HTML.
• An absolute URL for og:image, for an image under 600 KB, at least 300 pixels wide, and no wider than 4:1.

WhatsApp also keeps previews it has already made. After a fix, an old preview can stay for a while, and the checker can't clear that cache.

Looking for a LinkedIn Post Inspector alternative?

LinkedIn's own Post Inspector is free and needs a LinkedIn login. It's also the only tool that can refresh the preview LinkedIn has stored for your URL. This checker is a companion to it: no login, and it shows your tags and problems for four apps at once. When you've fixed your tags, run the URL through Post Inspector to refresh LinkedIn's copy.

LinkedIn's help page (checked 4 October 2026) asks for an image of at least 1200 × 627 pixels, at most 5 MB, at a ratio of 1.91:1. Images less than 401 pixels wide appear as a small thumbnail.

X cards

X reads twitter:card and falls back to Open Graph for the title, description and image. Use summary_large_image for a large image. X's card documentation is no longer online, so the numbers the checker uses for X are approximate: at least 300 × 157 pixels, at most 4096 × 4096, under 5 MB, as JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF, and no SVG.

Facebook

Facebook uses the same Open Graph tags. Meta's image guidance (checked 4 October 2026) says images smaller than 600 × 315 pixels show as a smaller preview, and recommends 1200 × 630.

Preview image sizes at a glance

A 1200 × 630 JPEG or PNG under 600 KB, with an absolute https:// URL, works for all four.

How the checker works, and what we log

• Our server in Helsinki, Finland fetches the page once with the User-Agent ShotvikBot/0.1 (+https://shotvik.com/bot), without cookies and without running JavaScript. It follows the same robots.txt rules as described on the ShotvikBot page. If your robots.txt blocks ShotvikBot, we don't fetch the page.
• It reads only the start of the preview image to measure it. For the Shotvik card it downloads the image and renders the card on our server.
• You get back the tags we found and our own renders, never the page itself. Links in the results are shown as text.
• We check the URL against a public phishing list and our own blocklist, and we don't fetch private or internal addresses.
• We log the time, the hostname you checked (no path or query), the result and your IP address only as a salted hash, for 30 days. No cookies, no analytics. See the privacy notice.
• There are limits per network and per day. The Acceptable Use Policy applies. To report abuse, email abuse@shotvik.com.

WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X and Facebook are trademarks of their owners. Shotvik isn't affiliated with or endorsed by them. The previews on this page are approximations made with our own HTML and CSS.