Your blog's link preview is probably broken — here's a 1-line CI check
The silent bug that quietly kills your click-through You add <meta property="og:image" content="...">, the preview looks fine when you test it, you ship. Weeks later the image gets moved, the CDN path changes, or it wa
The silent bug that quietly kills your click-through
You add <meta property="og:image" content="...">, the preview looks fine when
you test it, you ship. Weeks later the image gets moved, the CDN path changes, or
it was a relative URL all along — and now every share is a blank card. Your
click-through quietly drops and nothing alerts you.
Catch it in one request (or in CI)
I built OGCheck to catch exactly this. It parses your Open Graph +
Twitter Card tags, scores them, and — the key part most validators skip —
actually requests the og:image to confirm it returns HTTP 200.
python -m ogcheck https://your-site.com/blog/post
# exits non-zero if og:image 404s or required tags are missing -> perfect for CI
There's a JSON API and a GitHub Action too:
- uses: rahulatrkm/ogcheck@v1
with:
url: https://your-site.com
The 5 things that actually break previews
- The image URL 404s (most common)
- A relative URL instead of an absolute one
- A cached old preview on the platform (re-scrape to bust it)
- Wrong dimensions or file type (use PNG/JPG at 1200×630)
- Crawlers blocked by robots.txt or auth
It's a small "site health" suite now
Same free API also checks the other things that silently break how your site
shows up:
-
GET /check?url=…— social preview (Open Graph + og:image loads) -
GET /robots?url=…— robots.txt (catches an accidental site-wideDisallow: /) -
GET /sitemap?url=…— sitemap.xml (valid XML, reachable, lists URLs)
It's free, zero-dependency (pure Python stdlib), and open source:
https://github.com/rahulatrkm/ogcheck
If you monitor a lot of pages, I'm thinking about a paid "watch these URLs and
alert me when a preview breaks" tier — would that be useful? Honest feedback
very welcome, especially on false positives.
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.