What is Open Graph? (og:title, og:description, og:image explained)
Open Graph is a set of <meta> tags — originally a Facebook protocol, now read by nearly every platform — that tells the app pulling in your link what to show instead of guessing. Paste a URL into Slack and the title, description, and image that pop up a second later come from these tags, not from Slack reading your page like a person would.
Why it matters
Without Open Graph tags, most platforms fall back to scraping whatever they can find — your <title>, the first <meta name="description">, maybe the first <img> on the page — and the result is usually wrong or missing. A shared link with no image and a mangled title gets scrolled past; the same link with a clean title, a real description, and a proper preview image gets clicked. The tags are the difference between those two outcomes, and they cost four lines of HTML.
How to fix it
- Add og:title — a short, specific title for the share card. It doesn't have to match your <title> tag exactly, but usually can.
- Add og:description — one or two sentences that earn the click. Doesn't have to match your meta description.
- Add og:image — an absolute URL (https://..., not a relative path) to an image at least 1200×630px.
- Add og:url — the canonical URL of the page, so shares consolidate onto one link instead of splitting engagement across variants.
- Check the result with our checker, then check it again after any redesign — these tags are easy to forget when a template changes.
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