Everything You Need
To Know

Quick answers about meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, the SEO audit, and how MetaSnap works under the hood.

General

What is MetaSnap?
MetaSnap is a free meta tag previewer and SEO auditor. Enter any URL and instantly see how it looks on Google, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, WhatsApp, and Slack — and get a copy-paste optimised meta tag bundle.
Is it free? Do I need to sign up?
Yes, completely free and no signup. There are no rate limits, no ads, and no telemetry.
Does MetaSnap store the URLs I check?
No. URLs are fetched in-memory and never written to disk or a database. There is no analytics or telemetry.

Meta Tags

What is the ideal length for a meta title and description?

Titles work best at 50–60 characters so they don't get truncated in Google's results. Meta descriptions should be around 120–160 characters.

MetaSnap shows live character counts and an Optimal / OK / Too short / Too long indicator as you type.

What size should an Open Graph (og:image) be?

1200×630 pixels (1.91:1 aspect ratio) is the sweet spot. It works for Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, and X (Twitter summary_large_image).

Keep the file under 1 MB and use JPEG or PNG.

Why do my meta tags show different content than what I set?

Some platforms aggressively cache previews. To force a re-fetch:

MetaSnap always pulls a fresh copy on every audit.

Why do I need a separate twitter:image when I already have og:image?
You usually don't. X falls back to og:image when twitter:image is missing. The only reason to set both is when you want a different image specifically for X — for example a tighter 2:1 crop instead of the standard 1.91:1 OG image.
What is JSON-LD and do I really need it?
JSON-LD is structured data that tells search engines what your page is about in machine-readable form. It enables rich results in Google (FAQ snippets, sitelinks, product cards). It's optional but it's the lowest-effort way to stand out in SERPs. The bundle MetaSnap generates includes a basic WebSite schema you can extend.

SEO Audit

What does the SEO audit check?

The audit runs 15+ checks:

  • Title length & meta description length
  • og:image, twitter:image, favicon, apple-touch-icon
  • Canonical URL, html lang, viewport, robots (and noindex detection)
  • H1 heading count, JSON-LD structured data
  • og:site_name, og:type, twitter:card

Each check returns a pass / improve / fail status with a fix suggestion.

How is the score calculated?
Each check is weighted: pass = 100, improve = 60, fail = 0. The final score is the average. Grades: A (≥90), B (≥75), C (≥60), D (≥40), F (below).
How are the title and description suggestions generated?
They're built from existing signals on the page: the current title, og:title, h1, og:description, meta description, and the first meaningful paragraph. Suggestions are smart-truncated at word boundaries to fit the 60 / 160 character sweet spots — no LLM, no hallucinated content.

Tech & API

Does MetaSnap render JavaScript?
No, and that's intentional. Meta tags must live in the initial HTML response so crawlers like Facebook, X, and Slack can read them — they don't run JavaScript. A plain HTTP fetch and HTML parse covers virtually every real-world case while staying fast enough to host on a free tier.
Can I use MetaSnap's API?

Yes. Two endpoints:

  • POST /api/scrape — Body { "url": "https://..." } returns scraped meta tags as JSON.
  • POST /api/audit — Same body, returns full audit with score, grade, checks, suggestions, and an optimised meta tag bundle.

Both are free and unrate-limited.

What's the tech stack?

Backend: FastAPI + httpx + BeautifulSoup on Python.

Frontend: vanilla HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

Hosting: Docker on Hugging Face Spaces.