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Check · C06 · Security & bots

Meta tags check: title, description and og:title on the scanned page

The check reads three tags from the HTML of the scanned URL. One missing means "to review"; it does not rate length, duplicates or og:image.

What we check

In the HTML: the scan looks for three elements on the scanned page: the <title>, the <meta name="description"> and <meta property="og:title">, regardless of attribute order, as Next or Nuxt write them. If all three are there, the line is "ok". If one is missing, the line names it and reads "to review".

What the scan does not rate: length and content of the tags, duplicates across the site, og:image, og:description, canonical and robots meta. It reads only the scan's one URL; whether subpages carry the same tags stays open.

Why it matters

The three tags are the part of a page every human sees first: in search, in chat, in the feed. Without a title, Google makes one up from the page; without og:title, Slack shows the URL. For a tracking audit they are also an early indicator. Whoever failed to carry the meta tags over after the relaunch has usually forgotten the tracking snippet too; the line takes seconds to check and says a lot about how carefully the template was built.

Common causes

  • All templates share one generic title, every page is named the same.
  • og:title and og:image are missing, social and messenger shares render as a bare URL.
  • After a relaunch, canonicals point to the old domain or are missing on URL parameters.
  • A headless frontend sets the tags client-side only; the delivered HTML does not contain them.

The fix

Set title, description, og:title, og:description and og:image in every template, filled from the page's content fields, not from a global default. With headless and SPA frontends make sure the tags are rendered server-side; what JavaScript adds later, many crawlers never see. Then test one page with the LinkedIn or Meta sharing debugger, not just the homepage.

Check it yourself first

The Tracking Check tests this point along with all the others, in seconds.

Start the Tracking Check →
Why does a tracking check look at meta tags?

Because the same relaunch that forgets the tracking snippet also forgets the title. The three tags are the quickest indicator of whether a template was carried over cleanly. And a shared link without og:title lands as a bare URL in Slack and LinkedIn, which costs the traffic the tracking is supposed to measure.

The scan says ok, but all our pages have the same title. Why?

The scan checks only the one URL you entered, and only whether the tags exist. A generic title on every page, a 400-character description or an og:image pointing nowhere it does not detect. Search Console or an SEO crawler is the right tool for that.

We have an og:image but no og:title. Is that enough?

Not for the scan, and not for the networks either. LinkedIn, Slack and WhatsApp build the preview from og:title, og:description and og:image; without a title some fall back to the page title, others show nothing. Set all three and the preview looks the same everywhere.

The fix, delivered

Wired up in days, not sprints.

Findings from the Tracking Check go into a ranked sequence with effort estimates in the Audit Sprint, every module with an acceptance criterion.