What will 𝕏 show for this link?
Paste a link. This follows every redirect the way X's crawler does, reads the card tags off the page it actually lands on, and checks the image and robots.txt along the way.
Recent checks
How X reads a link
- It follows HTTP redirects, and only those.
- 301, 302, 307 and 308 are followed to the end. A
<meta http-equiv="refresh">or a JavaScriptlocation =is not — the crawler runs no JavaScript, so a page that redirects that way, or builds its tags client-side, has no card. - The tags, and their fallbacks.
twitter:cardpicks the layout.twitter:titlefalls back toog:title,twitter:descriptiontoog:description,twitter:imagetoog:image. Without atwitter:cardtag you get the smallsummarycard. The page's<title>and meta description are never used.- The image has rules.
- JPG, PNG, WEBP or GIF, under 5 MB, no bigger than 4096×4096. A large card wants at least 300×157 and crops to about 2:1 — 1200×600 is the safe size. A summary card wants at least 144×144 and shows a square. The URL must be absolute and fetchable as
Twitterbot/1.0. - robots.txt applies — to the image too.
- Twitterbot honours robots.txt. A
Disallowcovering the page hides the card; one covering the image host (a CDN, often) leaves the card with a grey box. This is the most common cause of a blank card and the hardest to spot by eye. - X caches cards for about a week.
- Fixing the tags won't change a card X has already seen. There's no official refresh any more; the usual workaround is to share the link with a query string it hasn't seen (
?v=2).