Instagram displays link previews in two contexts: DM conversations and Story link stickers. Both use Meta’s shared facebookexternalhit crawler, the same infrastructure behind Facebook and Threads. Story link stickers crop images to a square format, making image design considerations unique to Instagram compared to other Meta platforms.
Instagram Open Graph
Test and debug your Open Graph tags for Instagram
Instagram Specs
| Image size | 1080x1080px |
| Aspect ratio | 1.0:1 |
| Max file size | 5 MB |
| Formats | image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp, image/gif |
| User-Agent | facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php) |
How Instagram Crawls Your Pages
Understanding the shared Meta crawler infrastructure behind Instagram link previews
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Open Graph Meta Tags for Instagram
Which meta tags Instagram reads and how they appear in DMs and Stories
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Image Handling
Image sizes, aspect ratios, and cropping behavior for Instagram link previews
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Caching & Invalidation
How Instagram caches link previews and how to force a refresh
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Common Issues
Troubleshooting the most frequent Instagram link preview problems
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What links look like on Instagram
The difference Open Graph tags make when sharing a link.
This site doesn't have Open Graph
Instagram Open Graph
opengraphplus.com
Oh
Sites with Open Graph look like this
Instagram Open Graph
opengraphplus.com
Nice!
Debug Instagram Open Graph tags
Enter your site's URL to see how it looks on Instagram.