The four required tags

Facebook requires these four OG properties. Without all four, previews may be incomplete or missing:

<meta property="og:title" content="Page Title">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg">

• og:title: the preview title
• og:type: content type (website, article, product, video.movie, etc.)
• og:url: canonical URL of the page
• og:image: URL of the preview image

Recommended optional tags

Not required, but they make a noticeable difference in how the preview looks:

<meta property="og:description" content="A brief description of the page">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Your Site Name">
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US">

Facebook-specific tags

Beyond the standard OG protocol, Facebook supports:

• fb:app_id: ties previews to your Facebook app for sharing analytics
• fb:admins: comma-separated Facebook user IDs who can moderate comments on the preview
• fb:pages: associates content with a Facebook Page

<meta property="fb:app_id" content="your_app_id">

Image dimension hints

og:image:width and og:image:height tell the crawler the image size without downloading the file. Without them, the first person to share your URL may see a blank preview while Facebook fetches and inspects the image in the background.

<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">

Article extensions

When og:type is article, Facebook supports additional structured tags:

<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2026-01-15T08:00:00Z">
<meta property="article:author" content="https://example.com/author">
<meta property="article:tag" content="open graph">
<meta property="article:tag" content="facebook">

Fallback behavior

When OG tags are missing, Facebook falls back to standard HTML:

The heuristic image selection is unreliable. Facebook may pick a logo, an ad, or some random sidebar image. Always set og:image explicitly.