What Google, LinkedIn and WhatsApp take from your page
When you share a URL, Google, LinkedIn and WhatsApp build a card from what your head offers: the title, the description, the og:image and the canonical that indicates which URL is the original. What they cannot guess, they do not show — and what you offer too broad or too heavy, they leave out more often than you think.
The Linkpreview tool fetches the HTML of your URL through our server and reads, in your browser, what stands in the head and what is missing. It does not judge what a specific platform will show from it — those platforms' rules are private and change — but it does read what is there to take at all and what a sharer therefore cannot see.
This article walks the fields, names the classic shortfalls (image too heavy, alt text nowhere, canonical that loops) and connects to what crawlers expect from the same head (robots and sitemap).
The fields that make the card
`og:title` and `og:description` (or the twitter variants) carry title and cut; `og:image` carries the imagery — width, height and alt text matter; `og:url` or the canonical determines which address the card represents. A title that is 75 characters long gets shortened; a description that is missing becomes noise from the page itself. These are fields in your HTML, so their absence is a measurement, not a taste difference.
The image is where it often strands
An og:image that weighs 300 kB or measures 800×250 pixels is refused or flattened by many platforms — and an image that robots.txt blocks does not exist for a sharer. Check both sides: the linkpreview shows what your HTML offers, and the robots & sitemap tool shows what crawlers and sharers may read of it.
Canonical: which URL the card is
Share a URL with tracking parameters, and the canonical determines which address counts — a canonical that itself runs through a redirect chain divides your card into pieces that show different platforms different sides. The HTTP headers tool shows that chain; the linkpreview shows what the head makes of it.
Measuring, not guessing
You cannot feel the card of your product page, only measure it: paste the URL into the linkpreview and read what stands. What is missing stands as a shortfall — and the website scan carries the same head into the large report, alongside performance and headers (securing a website is the context in which this whole story belongs).