Open Graph Meta Tags: og:title, og:type, og:url, og:image

Open Graph tags are <meta> tags that describe a page for link previews: the title, type, URL and image. Facebook created the Open Graph protocol, and LinkedIn and Google also document their use of the tags. Add the four required tags, plus og:description, to each page that people share.

Syntax

This example comes from the protocol site:

<html prefix="og: https://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
<title>The Rock (1996)</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<meta property="og:type" content="video.movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />
</head>
</html>

Open Graph tags use the property attribute, not name. The prefix attribute on the <html> element declares the og: namespace.

Required tags

Tag	What it holds
og:title	The title of the object, for example “The Rock”
og:type	The type of object, for example website or article
og:image	The URL of an image that represents the page. Read the og:image guide
og:url	The canonical URL of the page, used as its permanent ID

Optional tags

Tag	What it holds
og:description	A description of one or two sentences
og:site_name	The name of the whole site, for example “IMDb”
og:locale	The language and territory, in the form en_US (the default)
og:locale:alternate	Other locales that the page is available in
og:determiner	The word before the title: a, an, the, auto or empty
og:audio	The URL of an audio file for the page
og:video	The URL of a video file for the page

Object types

The value of og:type sets the kind of object. The protocol says that pages without markup are treated as website. The article type adds its own properties: article:published_time, article:modified_time, article:expiration_time, article:author, article:section and article:tag. Other types are book, profile, music.* and video.*.

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2026-03-03T09:00:00Z" />

If a tag has more than one value, repeat the tag. If tags conflict, the first tag in the page wins.

Who reads the tags

1. Facebook. Meta’s webmaster guide lists og:url, og:title, og:description, og:image and fb:app_id as the basic tags. Without them, the Facebook crawler guesses the title, description and image.
2. LinkedIn. Its help page lists og:title, og:image, og:description and og:url as tags that must exist.
3. Google. Google lists og:title as one source for title links and og:site_name as one source for site names. Google can also use og:image to choose a preview image.
4. X. Its last published documentation said that X reads its own twitter: tags first and uses Open Graph tags when they are missing. Read the Twitter card meta tags guide.

What Open Graph tags do not do

Open Graph tags do not do these things:

1. They do not control indexing. Use the robots meta tag for that.
2. They do not make Google use your title. Google lists og:title with eight other sources for title links.
3. They do not change previews that already exist at once. Meta caches images by URL. Use the Sharing Debugger to make Facebook read the page again.

Test the tags

Paste the page URL into the Facebook Sharing Debugger. It shows the tags that the crawler reads, with errors and warnings. For LinkedIn, use the Post Inspector.