Open Graph
A set of meta tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) that control how a page appears when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and other social platforms.
Open Graph is a protocol originally created by Facebook in 2010 to let any web page control how it appears when shared on social platforms. Today it is the de-facto standard for social previews across the web, used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, and most other platforms that render a preview card for a URL. The tags live in the page's <head> as <meta property="og:..."> elements.
The minimum set is three tags: og:title (the headline shown in the card), og:description (the 1-2 sentence preview text), and og:image (the preview image, ideally 1200×630px). The recommended additions are og:url (canonical URL of the page being shared), og:type (article, website, product, etc.), og:site_name, and og:locale. X/Twitter falls back to Open Graph tags if no twitter:card is present, so most sites only need Open Graph — no Twitter-specific tags required.
Why it matters for SEO: Open Graph itself is not a Google ranking factor, but the click-through rate on shared links is. A missing or wrong og:image means a blank card, and a truncated og:title (over ~60 chars on mobile) means lost clicks. Google does use og:title and og:description as a hint when rewriting title tags and meta descriptions in SERPs, so good OG copy often improves both social and search appearance. Facebook's official debugger, LinkedIn's Post Inspector, and Twitter's Card Validator are the right tools for testing.
Common pitfalls: uploading an og:image smaller than 200×200 (most platforms reject it), using a 1200×600 image that crops to 1200×630 on some platforms, repeating the page's full SEO title in og:title (the social title can be more emotional), and forgetting og:url — without it, share counts fragment across parameter variants of the same page.