Open Graph images: why your link looks broken on LinkedIn
When a shared link shows no image or the wrong one, Open Graph tags are missing. What they are, the size that works everywhere, and how to fix a cached preview.
The short answer
When someone pastes a link to your page into LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams or a message, the platform fetches the page and looks for a small set of tags in its head called Open Graph tags. They say: use this title, this description and this image for the preview. If the image tag is missing, or the image is too small, the wrong shape, or not reachable, you get the empty grey box or a random logo. The page is fine; its preview is not.
What a working set looks like
| Tag | What it should contain |
|---|---|
og:title | The page’s title, as you want it shown in the preview |
og:description | One or two sentences that make someone want to click |
og:image | An absolute address of a 1200 by 630 pixel image, JPEG or PNG, under a few hundred kilobytes |
og:url | The canonical address of the page |
og:type | website for most pages, article for articles |
og:image:width and og:image:height | The image dimensions, so platforms lay out the preview before downloading |
Platforms also read a similar set of tags for the card format on X; sites set both from the same values.
Why previews break
- No image tag. The platform guesses, and guesses badly.
- Relative image address. The tag says
/images/hero.jpginstead of the fullhttps://address. Platforms cannot resolve it. - Wrong size or shape. A square logo or a tiny icon is rejected or cropped. 1200 by 630 works everywhere.
- Image not reachable. Behind a login, blocked for bots, or on a host that refuses the platform’s fetcher.
- Cached old preview. The tags were fixed after the first share; the platform still shows what it saw the first time.
How this site handles it
Every page carries the tags, generated from the same source as the page’s title and description, so they cannot drift. Knowledge articles get a branded image per topic at 1200 by 630, with the same image referenced in the article’s structured data. Nobody adds a tag by hand, and a new page gets a working preview without anyone remembering to make one.
What this means for you
Paste your homepage and your most shared page into a preview debugger. If the image is missing, wrong or ugly, the fix is a few tags per page and one well-sized image, ideally generated automatically so every page has them. Then refresh the caches and share again. Links that look right get clicked; links that look broken get scrolled past.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the preview show a random image from the page?
When there is no Open Graph image tag, platforms guess and pick an image from the page, often a logo, an icon or the first photo they find. An explicit tag tells them which image to use and stops the guessing.
We fixed the tags but the preview is still wrong.
The platform cached the old preview when someone first shared the link. Each major platform has a tool to refresh it: LinkedIn's Post Inspector, Facebook's Sharing Debugger, and similar for others. Paste the address, request a re-scrape, and the new preview appears.
Do we need a different image for every page?
Ideally each important page has its own, showing what the page is about. In practice a good default image for the site plus specific images for key pages, articles and products covers most needs. Generated images from the page title are a common middle ground.
Does this affect Google?
Open Graph tags are for sharing platforms, not for search ranking. Google uses its own signals for search previews, though it may use the image in some contexts. Treat Open Graph as how your links look when people share them, which affects clicks from those shares.
Sources
- The Open Graph protocol (accessed 2026-09-11)