Why this matters
A link you share is not a link. It's a card — an image, a headline, a line of description — and that card is the entire advertisement for whatever you're linking to. People decide whether to click based on it, usually without reading the URL at all.
When the card is wrong, nothing tells you. The post goes out, it looks broken or blank or shows somebody else's branding, and the only feedback is traffic that never arrives. There's no error, no warning, no log entry.
The awkward part is that "wrong" is rarely all-or-nothing. A link can render perfectly on Facebook and show a bare URL in iMessage, because the two use different crawlers and a surprising number of servers answer them differently — usually by accident, through a CDN rule, a bot filter, or preview middleware that treats one user-agent as a browser and another as a threat.
Most Open Graph checkers can't see that. They fetch your URL once and re-render that single response inside different card frames, so every platform tab necessarily looks identical. The one failure mode that actually bites you is the one they're structurally incapable of detecting.
What it does
Paste a URL and the tool fetches it once per platform — seven separate requests, each using the real user-agent that platform sends — then shows you what each one got back.
- Every platform, separately. Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, Reddit and Bluesky, each asked in its own right. When two disagree, you see it immediately.
- Card metadata.
og:title,og:description,og:imageand image alt text, plustwitter:card,og:site_nameand the canonical URL. Title length is checked against the point platforms truncate at, so you see the trim before your audience does. - Redirect chains. Every hop with its status code, per platform. This is usually the answer when two platforms disagree — and the reason a card sometimes shows a completely different site.
- Blocked vs broken. A bot filter refusing a crawler is reported as blocked and kept out of the comparison, never counted as a metadata problem. An ordinary site behind a WAF shouldn't read as failing.
The redirect trap
Worth calling out on its own, because it's the one that surprises people who use short links.
If your link redirects and the destination page has its own Open Graph tags, the scraper reads the destination's tags, not yours. Your carefully written card silently loses to whatever the target happens to have — which is often nothing, or a generic corporate default.
Because the redirect chain is shown per platform, you can see exactly where that happens, and whether it happens everywhere or only on some crawlers.
Check before you share, not after
Platforms cache share cards aggressively. Facebook and LinkedIn both offer a manual re-scrape when you need to force an update.
Bluesky doesn't. Its CardyB service bakes the card into the post record permanently — a post that captured a wrong card keeps it forever. You can't fix it, only delete and repost. That alone makes checking before you hit publish worth the ten seconds.
How it works
Browsers can't fetch another origin's HTML, and they certainly can't set a User-Agent header — so asking as each platform in turn only works server-side. The tool runs on @linkforty/og-core, our open-source engine, which is free to use in your own projects. Nothing you check is stored.
LinkForty handles this for you
The tool is a free standalone inspector — no LinkForty account needed, and it works on any URL, whether or not it has anything to do with us.
If you'd rather not think about share cards at all, that's what LinkForty's Social Share Preview does: set an image, title and description once for your organization, and every short link your team creates renders a proper card — with per-template overrides when a campaign needs its own artwork. Human visitors still get the normal redirect; only the scrapers see the preview HTML.
Try it
Open the Social Share Preview tool and paste a link you're about to post. It's free, no sign-up, and takes about ten seconds.