How admin controls affect previews

Google Workspace admins can disable link previews for an entire org or specific organizational units. When off, all URLs appear as plain text – no unfurl cards, regardless of OG tag quality.

How to tell if previews are admin-disabled

The key signal: no URLs generate previews, not just yours. If some links preview correctly but yours doesn’t, the issue is your OG tags, not an admin setting.

Other signs:

• Previews work in personal Gmail chat but not in Workspace Google Chat
• Previews work for external collaborators but not your org’s members
• No link previews have ever appeared in your org’s Chat spaces

The fix

OG tags can’t help here. The Workspace admin needs to:

1. Open the Google Admin Console
2. Navigate to Apps > Google Workspace > Google Chat
3. Enable link preview settings for the relevant organizational unit

Workarounds

If the admin won’t enable previews:

• Share a screenshot of the preview alongside the URL
• Use Google Chat’s “Card” message format via a Chat app/bot
• Include the key info (title, description) in the message text

Chat app link preview integrations

Separately from the org-wide toggle, Google Chat supports custom link preview integrations built into Chat apps. These are developer-controlled and per-space, independent of the admin setting.