What are Open Graph tags, and why do your links look wrong?
They are the instructions that decide what your page looks like when someone shares it — the title, description and image in the preview card. Without them, platforms guess, and the guess is usually a bare address nobody clicks.
What it actually is
When a link is pasted into a message, a post or a chat, the platform fetches the page and builds a preview. Open Graph tags are how you tell it what to show instead of letting it improvise from whatever it finds first, which is often your navigation, a cookie notice, or the logo in your header.
Why it matters
This is one of the few things on this list with an immediate, visible commercial effect. A shared link with a proper image and headline occupies real space in a feed and gets clicked; the same link as a bare address gets scrolled past. Every share of your site is either working for you or wasted, and the difference is decided entirely by these tags. It also governs how your links look when a colleague pastes them internally, which is where a surprising number of buying decisions start.
What good looks like
Each page declaring its own title, its own description and its own preview image — not the homepage's, repeated everywhere. The image should be a real, reachable file sized for a wide preview card, and the title and description should read as an invitation rather than a restatement of the page's file name.
Being honest about it
The payoff is in sharing and traffic rather than ranking — these tags are not a direct search factor and we would not pretend they are. But they are unusually cheap for the return, and the effect is immediately visible to you the first time you share your own link somewhere. If nobody ever shares your site, this genuinely does not matter much.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure is one preview for the entire site, so every article, service and case study shares an identical card and none of them look worth opening. The second, and the more annoying, is a preview image that has been deleted or moved: the tags are all present, an automated check reports success, and the actual card renders empty because the file behind it is gone.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 23% of the sites we could read passed the “Open Graph tags for sharing” check.
Shopify sites pass it most often, at 84%. Webflow sites pass it least often, at 4%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it went from 60% to 59%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Goes with
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Sites that pass this are 10.5 times as likely to pass the “OAuth authorization-server metadata” check too. 10% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 1% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 6 times as likely to pass the “Images are optimised” check too. 36% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 6% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 6 times as likely to pass the “Core security headers are set” check too. 23% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 4% of the sites that do not.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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