Twitter Card Meta Tags: twitter:card Syntax and Card Types

Twitter card meta tags are twitter: tags in the page head. They tell X, formerly Twitter, how to show a preview card when someone posts a link to the page. Add twitter:card to each page, and add Open Graph tags too, because X used them when a twitter: tag was missing.

Documentation status

X once documented Cards on its developer site. On October 22, 2026, the old Cards URLs on developer.x.com redirect to the home page of docs.x.com. The X for Websites section there covers embedded posts, buttons and widgets, but not Cards.

The facts on this page come from the last copies of X’s Cards pages in Arquivo.pt, the Portuguese web archive. The main sources are the markup reference, archived in December 2025, and the getting started guide, archived in February 2026. X does not say how it handles the tags today.

Syntax

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@example">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="One or two sentences about this page.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://example.com/images/page.png">
<meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="A gray cat asleep on a keyboard">

Card tags use the name attribute. The getting started guide said that the X parser also reads tags with the property attribute, as Open Graph uses. Only one card type works on a page. If a page has more than one twitter:card tag, the last one wins.

Card types

twitter:card value	Card
summary	Title, description and a thumbnail image
summary_large_image	Like summary, but with a large image
app	A card with a direct download link to a mobile app
player	A card that can play video, audio or other media

Tags and Open Graph fallback

The getting started guide said that X first looks for the twitter: tag. If that tag is missing, X uses the matching Open Graph tag. If your page already has Open Graph tags, you need only twitter:card and the tags that you want to be different on X.

Tag	What it holds	Fallback
twitter:card	The card type	og:type
twitter:site	The @username of the website	None
twitter:creator	The @username of the author	None
twitter:title	The title, at most 70 characters	og:title
twitter:description	The description, at most 200 characters	og:description
twitter:image	The image URL	og:image
twitter:image:alt	A text description of the image for people who cannot see it, at most 420 characters	og:image:alt

The markup reference said that X can show a summary card when twitter:card is missing but og:type, og:title and og:description exist. The reference also listed tags for the app and player cards, such as twitter:player and twitter:app:id:iphone.

Image rules

The image file must be smaller than 5 MB. X accepted JPG, PNG, WEBP and GIF. X used only the first frame of an animated GIF, and it did not support SVG.

Card	Aspect ratio	Size in pixels
summary	1:1. X crops the image to a square	144 by 144 to 4096 by 4096
summary_large_image	2:1	300 by 157 to 4096 by 4096

X asked for an image that is unique to the page. Do not use a generic image, such as your logo or an author photo.

Crawler, robots.txt and cache

X fetches the page and the image with its crawler, Twitterbot. The getting started guide said that the crawler follows Google’s robots.txt specification. If robots.txt blocks the page, X shows no card. If robots.txt blocks the image, X shows no image.

If your robots.txt blocks all other crawlers, you can still allow Twitterbot:

User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The guide also said that X caches the card content for 7 days after a post links to the page.

What the tags do not do

Twitter card tags do not do these things:

1. They do not control indexing. Use the robots meta tag for that.
2. They do not replace Open Graph. Facebook and LinkedIn document the Open Graph tags, not twitter: tags.
3. They do not change a card that X already cached. The cache lasted 7 days, as stated in the old guide.