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A homepage’s Open Graph tags are only useful if they are present in the HTML head, describe the homepage accurately, and point to resources a sharing platform can retrieve. The four basic properties are og:title, og:type, og:image, and og:url. The available evidence does not establish how many of the 62 audited homepages failed each check, so this guide explains how to identify the defects without implying unverified counts.
Which Open Graph tags should a homepage have?
The Open Graph Protocol defines four basic required properties, implemented as meta tags in the document head:
| Property | What to check on a homepage |
|---|---|
og:title |
A clear title that identifies the homepage or organization rather than an unrelated page or generic label. |
og:type |
A type that accurately describes the object. The protocol may require additional properties depending on the selected type. |
og:image |
A URL for the image intended to represent the homepage. |
og:url |
The intended canonical homepage URL. The protocol defines this as the object’s permanent ID in the graph. |
The protocol describes Open Graph as a way for a web page to become a rich object in a social graph. These tags supply metadata for that representation; they do not guarantee that every platform will show an identical preview.
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What can be broken in a homepage audit?
Separate defects into presence, accuracy, placement, and retrieval. A tag can exist and still be wrong: for example, an og:title can describe a campaign page instead of the homepage, or an og:url can identify a different address than the intended canonical homepage.
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- Missing: One or more of the four basic properties is absent.
- Inaccurate: A value exists but does not describe the homepage, its type, representative image, or canonical address correctly.
- Misplaced or inconsistent: Tags are outside the document head, or the delivered markup is invalid or inconsistent.
- Not confirmed by a debugger: A platform’s parser does not report the same metadata visible in the page source. This is a discrepancy to investigate, not by itself proof of a particular crawler or cache failure.
Google Search Central identifies the HTML head as the primary location for page metadata and warns that invalid or inconsistent markup can cause problems with metadata use in Google Search. That guidance concerns Google Search; it should not be treated as a statement of how every social platform handles Open Graph tags.
How to audit a homepage’s Open Graph metadata
- Inspect the delivered HTML. Open the homepage’s page source and look in the
<head>forog:title,og:type,og:image, andog:url. Check the HTML actually delivered to a visitor, not only a template or content-management setting. - Validate presence and values. Record whether each property exists and whether its value accurately represents the homepage. In particular, check that the image URL is the intended representative image and that the URL identifies the intended canonical homepage.
- Check placement and markup consistency. Confirm that the properties are in the document head and that the surrounding HTML is valid and consistent. Google’s metadata guidance is relevant to Google Search; it does not establish platform-specific social-preview rules.
- Compare with a parser or debugger. The Open Graph Protocol page links to Facebook’s Object Debugger. Use a debugger to compare what it reports with the source you inspected. Tool behavior and platform-specific refresh details can change, so do not assume a debugger’s result proves how every other platform will render the page.
Why might a shared link show the wrong title or image?
First compare the preview’s title and image with the values in the homepage’s delivered head. If the source values are missing or inaccurate, fix the page metadata. If they look correct but a debugger reports something different, the discrepancy is between the source and the parser’s reported result; inspect the delivered markup and the exact URL being tested before drawing conclusions. The available documentation does not establish a universal explanation for differences among platforms or their preview behavior.
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What the 62-homepage figure does—and does not—tell you
The title’s 62-homepage sample is not independently substantiated by the cited protocol or Google documentation. Those sources define the required basic properties and discuss metadata placement; they do not report defect counts or the prevalence of missing, duplicate, malformed, or inaccurate homepage tags. Without the audit records, no failure count or percentage can responsibly be attributed to the sample.
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