Missing og:image: the Open Graph tags squirrel checks

What Open Graph tags are

Open Graph is a set of <meta property="og:..."> tags that tell a link preview what to show. Facebook defined it, and LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and most other clients read the same tags. Without them a share falls back to whatever the client can scrape, which is usually the title element and the first image it finds.

The protocol requires four: og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url. og:description is optional in the protocol and is what most clients render under the title. og:image is the one that changes how a link looks in a feed, and 1200 by 630 pixels is the size that renders correctly in the widest set of clients.

What squirrel checks

The rule runs on every crawled page against the parsed Open Graph values. It emits one to four checks, one per missing tag plus a summary:

• og-title: warns with the message Missing og:title and a null value.
• og-description: warns with the message Missing og:description and a null value.
• og-image: warns with the message Missing og:image - social shares will lack imagery and a null value.
• og-type: reports at info status with the message Missing og:type (defaults to website) and a null value. The message reflects what most clients assume rather than a default the protocol defines; the protocol requires the property.
• og-tags: passes with the message Essential Open Graph tags present and a value showing the first 30 characters of the title, emitted only when title, description and image are all present.

og:type is informational and does not stop the summary passing, because most clients treat a missing type as website and render the preview anyway. Each missing tag is its own check, so a page missing all three essentials produces three warnings rather than one. The rule checks presence and never validates a value, so an og:image pointing at a URL that returns 404 passes.

How to fix it

<meta property="og:title" content="Configuring the build cache" />
<meta property="og:description" content="How the build cache stores compiled output between runs." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og/build-cache.png" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/guides/build-cache" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />

Use an absolute URL for the image, since some clients do not resolve a relative one. 1200 by 630 pixels is the size that renders correctly in the widest set of clients.

The common false positive is a page whose tags are injected on the client. squirrel reads the HTML the server sent unless browser rendering is on, and no share client runs JavaScript either, so a client-injected Open Graph tag is genuinely absent for the audience that matters.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["core/og-tags"]

Disable all Core SEO rules

[rules]
disable = ["core/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["core/og-tags"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• social/og-image-size: whether that image is the right dimensions.
• social/og-url-match: whether og:url agrees with the page’s canonical.
• core/twitter-cards: the X-specific tags, which fall back to these.
• social/asset-divergence: a favicon, theme colour or default share image that differs from the rest of the site.

Core SEO findings ship in every audit next to the performance, security and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• The Open Graph protocol
• The meta element, HTML Standard

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the Core SEO section of the report. Each missing tag is reported by name, page by page. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.