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Social preview — control how your short link looks when shared

Set the title, description and image that show up when your short link is pasted in iMessage, Slack, LinkedIn, X, Discord and other unfurling chat apps.

Updated yesterday 4 min read

Pasting a link into iMessage, Slack, X, LinkedIn or Discord triggers an unfurl — the apps fetch the page behind the link and show a card with a title, a one-line description and an image. The Social preview card on a link's edit page is where you decide what that card says about your short link.

Audience: anyone with the link editor Time: about a minute Outcome: clean unfurl on every chat app
You don't have to fill it in. Create a URL link and the three fields pre-fill from the destination's own meta tags — title, description and image. Open the link in Links and they're already there, ready to edit.

What the unfurl pulls from

OG title The big line at the top of the unfurl card. 120 chars max. OG description The grey subhead under the title. 320 chars max. OG image The hero artwork. 1200×630, PNG / JPG / WebP, under 2MB.

How the auto-fill works

When you create a URL-type short link, we fetch the destination once, parse its Open Graph meta tags (with a fallback to Twitter Card meta and the page's <title> + meta description), and copy them into your link's social preview.

  1. Anything reachable on the open web — your landing page, a blog post, a YouTube video, an Etsy listing.

  2. We make a single fetch to the destination in the background. Fast pages take a second; slow ones may take a few. You can carry on editing while it runs.

  3. The Social preview card shows the title, description and image we pulled. Everything is yours to override.

Auto-fill only runs once, on create. Editing the destination later doesn't trigger another pull — your hand-tuned title and description are safe. When you do want a fresh pull (the destination's been updated, or you swapped it out), click the Auto-fill from destination button at the top of the Social preview card.

The Auto-fill button

A black strip at the top of the Social preview card hosts the Auto-fill from destination button. Click it any time you want to re-pull from the destination — when you change the destination URL, or when the destination's OG meta has been refreshed.

The button overwrites. Anything you've typed in the three fields gets replaced. The button is the right tool when you want the destination's version; for keeping a hand-tuned title, just leave the button alone.

When auto-fill comes back empty

Some destinations don't expose social-preview meta. Bare sites, paywalled pages, certain SPAs, anything that returns non-HTML, anything blocking our user-agent. When that happens, the fields stay blank and you fill them in yourself — the manual form below the button is the same form it's always been.

The fallback chain inside the unfurl card. When OG title is blank, chat apps show the link's name instead (or the slug as a last resort). When OG description is blank, they show a brief "Save · share · track" line. When OG image is blank, no hero shows — just the title and description.

Auto-fill is URL-only. WiFi, vCard, Calendar, Maps, file-type and the rest serve their own scan page when the short link is opened — there's no upstream destination to fetch. The Social preview card still shows for those types so you can set a title, description and image manually if you plan to share the link in chats.

What an unfurl actually shows

OG IMAGE · 1200×630
LINKEDCO.DE
Your OG title goes here
A one-line description that explains what's at the other end of the click.
Stylised approximation — real apps draw the card differently, but the three fields below are the source of truth.

OG image — what to upload

Aspect
1200×630 (1.91:1) is the unfurl standard.
Formats
PNG, JPG or WebP.
Size
Under 2MB. We don't resize.
Replace
Click Replace in the OG image row to swap the file. Auto-fill replaces it too.
Ready? Edit a link.
Open one in Links and find the Social preview card.
Open Links

Troubleshooting

"Destination didn't expose any social-preview meta we could use." The destination came back without OG / Twitter / title tags — common for landing pages that haven't shipped meta yet, paywalled URLs, or single-page apps that render meta in JavaScript only. Fill the three fields by hand.
"Destination took too long to respond." The fetch timed out. Some hosts go to sleep and return slowly on cold-cache requests. Wait a beat and click Auto-fill from destination again.
The unfurl still shows the OLD card after I changed the title. iMessage, Slack and friends cache unfurls aggressively — sometimes for days. Most apps have a "re-fetch link preview" affordance in their dev tools, otherwise the cache clears on its own. Twitter / X has a dedicated Card Validator that forces a re-fetch; Facebook has the Sharing Debugger.
From here
Foundation Short links Slugs, destinations, and the rules around editing them later. Polish Password protection Gate sensitive links with a password screen before the redirect. After you ship Traffic Where the clicks come from, and how the unfurls perform.