What is Open Graph?

Glossary

Open Graph is a set of meta tags, created by Facebook, that control the title, description and image shown when a page is shared on social and chat apps.

Open Graph is a small set of tags you put in a web page's code to tell social networks and messaging apps how to present it when shared. It controls the headline, short description, image and link in the preview card. Facebook introduced it in 2010, and it is now read by almost every app that turns links into previews.

The tags that make up Open Graph

Open Graph tags are meta elements in the page's head, each with a property starting with og:. The protocol lists four as required:

og:title: the headline on the card.
og:type: what kind of thing the page is, usually website or article.
og:image: the picture, covered in detail in our OG image entry.
og:url: the canonical address the share should point to.

Common optional ones are og:description, og:site_name and og:locale. When an app like LinkedIn or Discord sees a new link, its crawler fetches the HTML, reads these tags and builds the card from them. If they are missing, it improvises from the title tag, the meta description and whatever images it finds.

Example: one page, two audiences

A wedding venue's page title is written for Google: "Barn Wedding Venue near Guelph | Willow Creek Farm". For sharing, the owner sets og:title to "Tour Willow Creek's restored 1890s barn" and an og:description inviting couples to book a viewing. Search results keep the keyword-led title, while shared links read like an invitation. That separation is the main practical reason to set Open Graph tags deliberately rather than letting them default.

Does Open Graph affect SEO?

Not directly. Google does not use Open Graph tags as a ranking signal, and they are not the same thing as structured data for rich results. Their value is in clicks from shares: a clear, attractive card gets more attention in a feed or chat than a bare URL. For a small business that relies on word of mouth, referrals shared in WhatsApp or Facebook groups are exactly where this shows.

Common Open Graph mistakes

Same tags on every page. Template defaults mean every blog post shares as "Home".
Tags added by JavaScript after load. Most preview crawlers do not run scripts, so the tags must be in the HTML the server sends.
Wrong og:url. Pointing every page at the homepage makes all shares open the homepage.
Forgetting to re-scrape. Apps cache cards; use each platform's debugger after changing tags.