LinkedIn Post Inspector: fix how your links look on LinkedIn
·7 min read
LinkedIn Post Inspector, at linkedin.com/post-inspector, is LinkedIn's own tool for checking how a link will look when someone shares it. Paste a URL and LinkedIn fetches the page again, shows the preview it builds with the title, image and description it chose, and refreshes its stored copy so new posts get the corrected card. Posts that already went out keep their old preview. If the card is still wrong after an inspection, the fault is in your page's Open Graph tags or in something that stops LinkedIn from fetching the page or its image.
So fix the tags first and inspect second. Inspecting a broken page just stores the same broken card again.
What LinkedIn Post Inspector shows
Post Inspector shows the preview LinkedIn will build for a URL and how it picked each part of it. LinkedIn's engineers built it to expose their content ingestion pipeline, and their write-up of the tool lists what it reports:
- The values LinkedIn chose for the title, image, description and content provider.
- Feedback on candidate values that failed, naming the criterion each one missed.
- When LinkedIn last updated its information about the URL.
The feedback is the part to read. A card with no image tells you something is wrong. A note saying which requirement your og:image failed tells you what to change.
How to refresh a LinkedIn link preview
LinkedIn's help article on Post Inspector gives the short version. Open the tool, enter the URL, and confirm the preview is right. On a real site, do it in this order.
- Publish the fix and purge your CDN or page cache, so the live URL returns the new tags.
- Check the live HTML. View source or fetch the page with curl, and look for the
og:lines in the head. - Open https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/ and sign in if LinkedIn asks.
- Paste the exact URL you plan to share, with the same protocol, host and query string.
- Run the inspection and compare the card and the chosen values with your tags.
- Fix anything the feedback names and inspect again.
- Write a new post with the link.
Step 2 is the one people skip. If your CDN still serves yesterday's HTML, Post Inspector stores yesterday's tags, and it looks like the tool did nothing.
LinkedIn preview not updating? Old posts keep the old card
A refreshed preview only applies to posts created after the refresh. LinkedIn's Post Inspector help says an inspection changes the preview for new posts that include the URL, and posts already published keep the preview they had.
Editing the post won't fix it either. LinkedIn's help on editing posts says you can change a post's text but not its shared rich media, articles included. The only way to put a new card on a live post is to delete it and post again, which throws away its reactions and comments. For a post that already has traction, I'd usually live with the old card and get the next share right.
The same page says LinkedIn's share box remembers the content of the last link you shared for three days. That's one more place an old title can hang around even after Post Inspector shows the new one.
When you replace the share image, upload it under a new file name instead of overwriting the old file. With a new URL, no cache between your server and LinkedIn can hand back the old picture.
Which tags LinkedIn reads for a link preview
LinkedIn builds the card from Open Graph tags. Its guide to making a website shareable on LinkedIn says these four must exist:
<meta property="og:title" content="Pricing for teams" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Plans start at $20 per seat a month. Compare limits and features." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og/pricing-v2.png" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/pricing" />LinkedIn's engineering post says it uses Open Graph or oEmbed tags when a page has them and falls back to other methods, which it doesn't name, when a page lacks them. That fallback is where wrong titles and random images come from. Without og:title, LinkedIn picks a title by rules you can't see, and you find out what it picked after you post. Put all four tags on every page you expect people to share and the guessing stops.
Two details trip people up. Write og:image as a full https URL, not a relative path like /og/pricing.png, so nothing depends on the reader resolving it. And set og:url to the same URL as your canonical tag, so the card and search engines point at one address.
LinkedIn image size for link posts
LinkedIn's minimum for a link preview image is 1200 by 627 pixels at a 1.91:1 ratio, with a 5 MB cap. All of these come from the same LinkedIn guide:
| Spec | LinkedIn link preview |
|---|---|
| Minimum size | 1200 x 627 px |
| Ratio | 1.91:1 |
| Maximum file size | 5 MB |
| Shown as a small thumbnail | Images under 401 px wide |
| File formats | Not listed for link shares |
The guide lists JPG, PNG and GIF only for single image ads. For a link preview, use JPG or PNG and you never have to find out what else LinkedIn accepts.
Make one 1200 x 630 image per page and use it on every platform. It clears LinkedIn's minimum and matches the size Meta recommends for Facebook link shares. Saved as a JPG it lands well under 1 MB, nowhere near the cap.
Why LinkedIn link previews break
When the tags are right and the card is still wrong, LinkedIn usually couldn't fetch something. These are the usual causes.
LinkedInBot can't reach the page or the image
LinkedIn fetches your page with its own preview crawler, which identifies itself as LinkedInBot in its user agent. LinkedIn's sharing guide says that if an image meets the requirements and still doesn't appear, your site may be blocking LinkedIn from pulling it, or the image may sit in a protected directory.
Bot protection is the usual suspect. A WAF rule, a JavaScript challenge, a rate limit or a country block can answer LinkedInBot with a 403 or a challenge page instead of your HTML. Search your firewall or CDN logs for requests whose user agent contains LinkedInBot, and allow them on the pages and images you want shared.
A rough test from your own machine:
curl -s -A "LinkedInBot" https://example.com/pricing | grep -i 'property="og:'
curl -sI -A "LinkedInBot" https://example.com/og/pricing-v2.pngThe first command should print your tags. The second should return 200 with an image/ content type. Don't read too much into a pass. A firewall that checks where a request comes from treats your laptop differently from LinkedIn's servers, so Post Inspector is still the real test.
The og:image URL works for you and nobody else
An image that loads in your browser can still fail for a crawler. Common versions are an image on a staging host behind a login, a signed S3 or CDN URL that expires an hour after the page renders, hotlink protection that rejects requests without your domain in the Referer header, and an og:image that points at an HTML page showing the image instead of the image file itself.
The shared URL redirects
A crawler that follows a redirect reads the tags on the page where the chain ends, not the page you meant to share. Redirects that are harmless in a browser can send a bot to a cookie consent wall, a login page or a country picker, each with its own tags or none. Share the final URL, and trace the redirect chain if you aren't sure what it is.
The tags are added with JavaScript
LinkedIn doesn't say its crawler runs JavaScript, so assume it reads only the HTML your server sends. Single-page apps often set Open Graph tags in the browser after load. The tags then show up in the browser's element inspector and nowhere in view-source. Render them on the server or prerender the page. To see what is missing from the raw HTML, compare the raw and rendered versions of the page.
Facebook reads the same tags but keeps its own cache and its own refresh tool. If the link is wrong there too, the Facebook Sharing Debugger guide covers that side.
Find what's wrong with your LinkedIn preview tags
Post Inspector is how you refresh LinkedIn's cached preview, and our checker can't do that for you. Our Open Graph checker is the step before it. It fetches your page, lists every og: and twitter: tag in the head, and shows which title, description and image a card would use and which tag each one came from. It flags a missing og:title, og:description, og:image or og:url, an image URL that is relative or plain http, an og:url that differs from the canonical, and duplicate tags with conflicting values.
It also downloads the share image and reports its HTTP status, format, pixel size and file size. It flags an image that doesn't load or isn't an image, one over 5 MB, one too small for a large card, and one whose ratio will be cropped. When a rate limit, bot check or 403 stops the download, it says so, because the same rule can stop LinkedInBot. A run costs 5 credits.
The checker reads the HTML your server returns, so it won't see tags added by JavaScript, and its card is an approximation, not LinkedIn's exact layout. Fix what it finds, then run the URL through Post Inspector so LinkedIn stores the new card.