How LinkedIn reads your link
When you paste a URL into LinkedIn — in a post, comment, or message — LinkedIn's crawler fetches the page and reads the og:* meta tags in the <head>. What it finds there becomes the preview card: title, description, and image.
LinkedIn does not read the page visually. It reads the tags. If the tags are wrong, missing, or cached from an older version of the page, the preview will be wrong regardless of what the live page looks like.
Run the free Open Graph Checker to see which tags are missing, invalid, or too small.
The Open Graph tags it needs
LinkedIn relies on four core tags:
og:title— the bolded headline in the cardog:description— the supporting line below the titleog:image— the preview imageog:url— the canonical URL of the page
All four should be present. A missing og:image will produce a text-only card. A missing og:url can cause the canonical to mismatch the shared link.
Use the Open Graph Checker to confirm all four are present and correctly formed before anything else.
Image rules
LinkedIn expects an image at 1200×627 pixels. This is slightly different from the general Open Graph standard of 1200×630 — both work, but 1200×627 is the size LinkedIn officially documents.
Two requirements that LinkedIn enforces strictly:
- The URL must be absolute — it must start with
https://. A relative path like/og.pngwill not render. - The image must be publicly reachable — no authentication, no IP allowlists, no cookies required.
If your image is behind any kind of access control, LinkedIn's crawler will fail silently and show no image.
The 7-day cache and Post Inspector
LinkedIn caches page scrapes for approximately 7 days. This means fixing your tags on the live page is not enough — the old preview will continue appearing until the cache expires or you force a refresh.
To force a refresh, use LinkedIn Post Inspector. Paste your URL and click Inspect. LinkedIn will re-scrape the page immediately and show you what it now reads.
Always fix the tags first, then use Post Inspector. Running Post Inspector before fixing the tags will just cache the broken version again.
Checklist
Work through these in order:
- Check
og:title,og:description,og:image, andog:urlare present — use the Open Graph Checker - Confirm
og:imageuses an absolutehttps://URL - Confirm the image is publicly accessible (open it in an incognito window)
- Set the image to 1200×627 pixels
- Deploy the fix to the live page
- Open LinkedIn Post Inspector, paste the URL, and click Inspect
- Verify the updated preview appears in the inspector before sharing
If the preview still looks wrong after these steps, check that your page is not using JavaScript to render the <head> — LinkedIn's crawler does not execute JavaScript and will miss tags that are injected client-side.