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Website metadata checker
Inspect a page's title, meta description, canonical, robots directive, Open Graph and Twitter card. Quickest way to spot missing or duplicated SEO fields.
Quick answer
What is a meta tag checker?
A meta tag checker fetches a page and reports the tags search engines and social platforms read from its head: title, meta description, canonical, robots directive, viewport, Open Graph properties, and the Twitter card type. This checker also measures the title and description against the lengths that survive truncation, so you can see missing and oversized fields in one pass instead of hunting through view-source.
Which meta tags still matter
The list of meta tags worth auditing is shorter than most checklists suggest. These carry real weight:
- title - the strongest on-page statement of what a page is about, and the clickable line in results.
- meta description - no ranking effect, direct click-through effect.
- link rel=canonical - tells Google which URL of a duplicate set to index.
- meta robots - noindex, nofollow, max-snippet and friends; the single most damaging tag to get wrong.
- viewport - required for mobile rendering, and mobile is what Google indexes.
- og:title, og:description, og:image - what renders when the link is shared or previewed.
- meta keywords - dead. Google has ignored it for well over a decade; finding it is harmless, removing it changes nothing.
The mistakes this check is designed to catch
A stray noindex left over from a staging deploy is the highest-cost bug in SEO and the easiest to miss, because the page looks perfect to a human. Second most common is a canonical pointing at the wrong URL - the homepage, an http variant, or a page-one canonical on every paginated page - which quietly removes the page from consideration.
The Open Graph fields fail differently: nothing breaks, the link just previews as a bare URL with no image, and share click-through falls without anyone noticing. Platforms fall back to the title tag when og:title is absent, but they do not invent an image.
A note on how the fetch works
This tool requests the page from your own browser, which means sites that do not send permissive cross-origin headers can refuse the request - you will see a fetch error rather than results. That is a browser security boundary, not a fault in the page.
When that happens, open the page, view source, and search for the tags directly, or use our SEO Score Checker, which audits the page server-side. Note too that any tag injected by JavaScript after load may not appear in the raw HTML - Google renders pages before evaluating them, so a client-side title can still work, but server-rendered metadata is the safer default.
Where this data comes from
The page is fetched directly from your browser and its raw HTML is parsed for the title element and the meta and link tags listed above. Length checks use the conventional guidance bands - roughly 50-60 characters for titles and 140-160 for descriptions - which are guidance, not thresholds published by Google. Cross-origin restrictions mean some sites cannot be fetched this way, and tags added by JavaScript after load are not visible in the raw HTML. Nothing is stored.
Frequently asked questions
What is a meta tag checker used for?
Verifying that a page carries the tags search engines and social platforms need, and that none of them are misconfigured. In practice the highest-value checks are a self-referential canonical, the absence of an accidental noindex, a title in the 50-60 character band, and complete Open Graph tags. It is the fastest pre-publish and post-deploy sanity check available.
Why did the checker fail to load my page?
The fetch runs in your browser, so a site that does not send permissive cross-origin headers will block it - and some hosts also block requests without a browser referrer. The tags are still fine; the request was refused. View the page source directly, or run the URL through our SEO Score Checker, which fetches server-side.
Do meta keywords still matter?
No. Google confirmed years ago that meta keywords are not used, and other major engines followed. Leaving the tag in place does no harm and removing it gains nothing. If you find it on a site, treat it as a sign the template has not been reviewed in a long time and check the tags that do matter.
What is the difference between meta robots and X-Robots-Tag?
They express the same directives - noindex, nofollow, noarchive - in different places. Meta robots is an HTML tag, so it only works on HTML pages. X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP response header, which means it can control non-HTML files like PDFs and images. A header-level noindex is invisible in view-source, which makes it a classic cause of pages disappearing for no apparent reason.
What should my canonical tag point to?
Usually the page itself - a self-referential canonical on the version you want indexed, with the correct protocol, host, and trailing-slash convention. Point it elsewhere only when the page genuinely duplicates another. The frequent failures are canonicals hardcoded to the homepage, canonicals pointing at http on an https site, and paginated pages all canonicalising to page one.
Do I need Open Graph tags if I do not post on social media?
Yes, because you are not the only one sharing your links. Slack, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, iMessage, and most chat apps read Open Graph to build previews. Without og:image and og:description, a link that a customer pastes into a work channel renders as a naked URL - the worst possible presentation for something you want clicked.
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