YouTube Link Preview Checker

Q: Is Peekly free?

Yes. Checking a single URL is free forever — no signup and no limit on one-off checks. Batch watching and monitoring may arrive later as a paid Pro plan; the free single-URL tool stays.

Q: Why does my link show no image when I share it?

Usually one of four things: there's no og:image tag, the image URL is relative instead of absolute, the image is behind a login, firewall or bot block, or the file is too big or in an unsupported format like SVG. Peekly checks all four and tells you which one it is.

Q: What size should my og:image be?

1200×630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) as a PNG or JPG under about 300 KB. That size works for large cards on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack and WhatsApp.

Q: Do I need twitter: tags if I already have Open Graph tags?

X reads og:title, og:description and og:image as fallbacks, but you still need twitter:card set to summary_large_image if you want the big image card. Without it, X shows a small thumbnail.

Q: I fixed my tags but the old preview still shows. Why?

Platforms cache link previews, sometimes for days. Facebook and LinkedIn let you force a refresh with their own debugging tools. On X, Slack and Discord the cache usually expires on its own, or you can add a query string such as ?v=2 to the URL.

Q: Do you store the pages I check?

No. We fetch the page once to read its , show you the result, and don't save the page or the result. We only fetch public http(s) URLs, and private or internal addresses are blocked.

A YouTube watch page already has a title, a description, and a thumbnail in Open Graph. Paste the video URL to read them. The cards below are the other platforms that read the same tags — Peekly does not draw a YouTube player.

How a YouTube share card is built

Tags on the watch page. YouTube does not publish a webmaster guide for these tags. A public watch page does include them in the HTML, for an ordinary browser and for a crawler. On https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ they were og:site_name YouTube, og:url set to that watch URL, og:title set to the video title, and og:description set to a shortened description. og:image was https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg with og:image:width 1280 and og:image:height 720, a 16:9 frame. og:type was video.other. twitter:card was summary_large_image, twitter:site was @youtube, and twitter:image repeated the same file. twitter:player pointed at the embed URL, and so did og:video:url and og:video:secure_url, with og:video:type text/html and a declared size of 1280×720. The card type YouTube chose is the large image, so a consumer that honors twitter:card shows the thumbnail rather than a player. The thumbnail itself is chosen in YouTube Studio. There is no meta tag on youtube.com for you to edit.
```
<meta property="og:title" content="Video title">
<meta property="og:description" content="The first lines of the description.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/maxresdefault.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1280">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="720">
<meta property="og:type" content="video.other">
<meta property="og:video:type" content="text/html">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
```
oEmbed uses a smaller thumbnail. YouTube's oEmbed endpoint answers any client: GET https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url= plus the watch URL, and format=json. For the same video the JSON type was video, with title, author_name, author_url, and provider_name YouTube. thumbnail_url was https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/hqdefault.jpg at 480×360. The html field is an iframe aimed at youtube.com/embed/. There is no description field. A preview built from oEmbed and a preview built from og:image are different pictures: 480×360 against 1280×720. YouTube does not publish a promise that maxresdefault.jpg exists for every video. When that file is missing, a client that guessed the filename has a broken image, and the oEmbed thumbnail is the file the oEmbed response actually named. Paste the watch URL here. This checker reads og:image from the page and downloads it, which is the larger file when YouTube emitted one.
The video tag is an embed page. og:video on that watch page is the embed document, and og:video:type is text/html. It is not a video file. Discord's link-preview docs play a video only for video/mp4, video/webm, and video/quicktime, and they require og:image as the preview frame. A YouTube link in Discord keeps the image card. The same is true anywhere else that will only attach a file it can play. oEmbed's html iframe is how a site embeds the player on purpose. A share card does not run that iframe. If the card you want is a custom title and a custom image, publish those on a page you control and link the watch URL from the page. The Open Graph tags on youtube.com stay YouTube's.
Short URLs, and a stale card. youtu.be/VIDEO_ID responds with a redirect to youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&feature=youtu.be. A crawler that follows the redirect reads the watch page, and the og:url on that page is the watch URL without the short host. This checker follows up to five redirects, then grades the page it lands on. YouTube does not publish a scrape-again tool. Editing the title or the thumbnail updates the next fetch of the watch page. A post that already stored the card keeps it. The Refresh a Link Preview Cache page lists the debugger each other platform documents. Facebook's is the Sharing Debugger, and it is the one that refetches a YouTube URL for Facebook. A query string on the watch URL is a different URL.

Tags covered: og:title · og:description · og:image · og:type · og:video · og:video:type · twitter:card · twitter:image · twitter:player

More checkers

What each platform reads

X / Twittertwitter:card, twitter:* → og:* fallback1200×630 (min 300×157), < 5 MB
Facebookog:title, og:description, og:image1200×630, 1.91:1
LinkedInog:title, og:image (og: only)1200×627, 1.91:1
Discordog:site_name, og:*, theme-color, twitter:cardLarge image needs summary_large_image
Slackog:site_name, og:title, og:description, og:image1200×630
WhatsAppog:title, og:description, og:imageKeep < 300 KB

Guidance based on each platform's public documentation and observed behavior. Platforms change their rules without notice.

FAQ

+Is Peekly free?

Yes. Checking a single URL is free forever — no signup and no limit on one-off checks. Batch watching and monitoring may arrive later as a paid Pro plan; the free single-URL tool stays.

+Why does my link show no image when I share it?

Usually one of four things: there's no og:image tag, the image URL is relative instead of absolute, the image is behind a login, firewall or bot block, or the file is too big or in an unsupported format like SVG. Peekly checks all four and tells you which one it is.

+What size should my og:image be?

1200×630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) as a PNG or JPG under about 300 KB. That size works for large cards on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack and WhatsApp.

+Do I need twitter: tags if I already have Open Graph tags?

X reads og:title, og:description and og:image as fallbacks, but you still need twitter:card set to summary_large_image if you want the big image card. Without it, X shows a small thumbnail.

+I fixed my tags but the old preview still shows. Why?

Platforms cache link previews, sometimes for days. Facebook and LinkedIn let you force a refresh with their own debugging tools. On X, Slack and Discord the cache usually expires on its own, or you can add a query string such as ?v=2 to the URL.

+Do you store the pages I check?

No. We fetch the page once to read its <head>, show you the result, and don't save the page or the result. We only fetch public http(s) URLs, and private or internal addresses are blocked.

+Are the previews pixel-perfect?

They're close approximations of each platform's current card layout, built from the same tags the platforms read. Platforms change their designs from time to time, so treat them as a very good guide rather than a screenshot.

One time

A written fix for the batch.

Up to 25 URLs. We check og:image, Twitter cards, size, redirects, and cache, then send copy-paste meta tags within 48 hours. The free single-URL check stays free.

Get the fix report — $9