Why link previews on LinkedIn, Slack, X and WhatsApp often show outdated or broken content
Link previews on platforms like LinkedIn, Slack, X and WhatsApp are generated from the raw HTML a crawler receives, not from what a browser renders after running scripts. As a result, meta tags added only by client-side JavaScript are frequently invisible, and platforms may keep showing a previously cached card. The common standard is Open Graph, with LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Slack relying on og:title, og:image, og:description and og:url, while X uses twitter:card and falls back to Open Graph tags. Details such as absolute image URLs, correct canonical URLs and accurate image dimensions also matter, and each platform imposes its own size and aspect-ratio limits. Developers are advised to serve these tags in the initial HTML response and to change an image's URL when replacing its contents, so caches refresh.
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