How TikTok caches link previews
TikTok caches preview data after TikTokSpider fetches a page. The cache duration isn’t documented and TikTok provides no official guidance on TTL or invalidation. Cached previews can persist for a long time.
No public debugger
TikTok has no equivalent of Facebook’s Sharing Debugger or Twitter’s Card Validator. There’s no “re-scrape” button.
Forcing a refresh
Options are limited:
- Wait for the cache to expire – timing is unpredictable
- Append a query parameter (
?v=2) to force TikTok to treat the URL as new - Change the URL path if you control the structure
Bio link caching
Bio link previews may cache differently from in-app link previews. If your bio link looks stale, try removing it and re-adding it to trigger a fresh fetch.
When caching goes wrong
- Updated tags but old preview showing – wait it out or use a query parameter
- Different previews in different contexts – bio links, comments, and DMs may cache independently
- No preview after update – your server may have errored during a re-crawl