30-minute cache TTL

Snapchat caches preview data for about 30 minutes – one of the shortest windows of any major platform. Compare that to Twitter’s ~7 days or Facebook’s ~30 days. After 30 minutes, the next share triggers a fresh fetch.

Why this is actually nice

• Tag changes reflect quickly
• No need for a cache-clearing tool or debugger
• Easy to iterate during development

The re-fetching trade-off

The flip side: Snapchat’s crawler hits your server more frequently than other platforms. For viral links shared repeatedly on Snapchat, you’ll see more Snap URL Preview Service requests. Make sure your server doesn’t rate-limit the crawler.

Forcing an immediate refresh

• Append a query parameter (?v=2) to force Snapchat to treat the URL as new
• Or just wait – 30 minutes is short enough that waiting usually wins

When caching goes wrong

• Preview looks stale – wait 30 minutes and re-share
• Server error cached – errors are also cached for up to 30 minutes
• Inconsistent previews – messages within the cache window share one preview; messages after a re-crawl may differ