Why does my link look plain when it is shared on X?
When someone shares your link on X, the post can show a preview card with a picture, a title and a line of description, or just the bare address. A handful of tags in your page decide which. We check that X has an image to use, and we count the Open Graph image X falls back to.
What it actually is
It is the poster X pins up when someone shares your page. X reads its own card tags first, and where one is missing it borrows the matching Open Graph tag, the same tags Facebook and LinkedIn read. So a page with a good Open Graph image usually already has a card. The one decision with no Open Graph equivalent is the card type, small thumbnail or large image.
Why it matters
A shared link competes with everything else in the feed. A preview with a picture takes up more room and tells people what they are about to open, which is why people choose it more often. When there is no image, your link shrinks to text, however good the page behind it is.
What good looks like
A page that gives X an image to show, either its own card image or an Open Graph one, plus a title and description that make sense out of context, and ideally a card type that asks for the large image when you have a picture worth showing.
Being honest about it
This does not move your score. A preview on one social network is a human-facing detail, not something that decides whether a machine can read your page, so it lives in the Good practice group. We also do not insist on the card type tag: X builds a preview from Open Graph alone, so asking for it would mark down pages that already share well.
Where most sites go wrong
The usual cause is a page with no image tags at all, often a page built outside the main template. The other is an image address that no longer works, or one that points somewhere X cannot reach, so the card quietly falls back to text.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 75% of the sites we could read passed the “Twitter/X card tags” check.
Shopify sites pass it most often, at 84%. WordPress sites pass it least often, at 65%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it went from 69% to 68%.
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 2.5 times as likely to pass the “AI bot rules are explicit and intentional” check too. 15% 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 1.5 times as likely to pass the “Images are optimised” check too. 14% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 9% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 1.5 times as likely to pass the “Core security headers are set” check too. 9% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 5% 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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