> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://metamanager.dev/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Previews

> How the same page resolves differently on eight platforms.

Every platform builds its preview from a different set of tags, with a different fallback order. A page can look perfect on X and broken on LinkedIn, and the tags themselves will not tell you which.

`previews` resolves all eight for you.

## The eight

| Key        | Platform      | Reads                                                        |
| :--------- | :------------ | :----------------------------------------------------------- |
| `google`   | Google search | `<title>` and `meta description` only — **never** Open Graph |
| `x`        | X / Twitter   | `twitter:*` preferred, `og:*` as fallback                    |
| `facebook` | Facebook      | Open Graph. Does not read `twitter:*`                        |
| `linkedin` | LinkedIn      | Open Graph, falling back to page title and meta description  |
| `discord`  | Discord       | Open Graph only                                              |
| `whatsapp` | WhatsApp      | Open Graph only                                              |
| `slack`    | Slack         | Open Graph, falling back to page title and description       |
| `telegram` | Telegram      | Open Graph only                                              |

Each preview carries its own `basis` string stating these rules, so the response
explains itself without this table.

<Note>
  Where a platform's behaviour is undocumented, the resolver is deliberately
  conservative — it assumes no `twitter:*` fallback rather than guessing one.
  Predicting a preview that does not appear is a worse failure than predicting
  a plainer one that does.
</Note>

## What each one returns

```json theme={null}
"google": {
  "title": "Stripe | Financial Infrastructure to Grow Your Revenue",
  "description": "Stripe is a financial services platform that helps…",
  "image": null,
  "domain": "stripe.com",
  "source": {
    "title": "<title>",
    "description": "description",
    "image": null
  },
  "approximate": true,
  "basis": "Search results are built from the page title and meta description; OG tags are not used.",
  "favicon": "https://…/favicon.svg"
}
```

| Field                           | What it is                                                           |
| :------------------------------ | :------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `title`, `description`, `image` | What this platform would actually show, after its own fallback chain |
| `source`                        | **Which tag each value came from.** The most useful field here.      |
| `domain`                        | The host as this platform displays it                                |
| `approximate`                   | Whether the rendering is an approximation — see below                |
| `basis`                         | Plain-English statement of this platform's rules                     |
| `favicon`                       | The icon this platform would use, where it uses one                  |

## `source` is the field to read

Two pages can produce an identical preview for entirely different reasons. `source` tells you which tag did the work:

```json theme={null}
"source": { "title": "og:title", "description": "og:description", "image": "og:image" }
```

versus

```json theme={null}
"source": { "title": "<title>", "description": "description", "image": null }
```

The second page has no Open Graph tags at all. It still previews — because platforms fall back — but you are getting whatever the fallback produces rather than what you chose. That distinction is invisible in `title` alone.

## `approximate`

**Every preview is `approximate: true`**, and the field exists to say so rather than to distinguish good pages from bad ones.

No platform publishes its exact rendering rules, and real output depends on things invisible from the HTML: A/B tests, personalisation, the platform's own crawl cache, and layout rules that change with image aspect ratio. Google is the extreme case — search results are generated rather than rendered, and it may rewrite your title entirely if something else matches the query better.

<Note>
  `approximate: true` is not a warning about your page. It is us declining to overstate how precisely anyone can predict a third party's renderer.
</Note>

## Why Google ignores Open Graph

The single most common misunderstanding this endpoint clears up.

Google builds search results from `<title>` and `meta description`. It does not read `og:title` or `og:description`. A page with immaculate Open Graph tags and no `meta description` will preview beautifully on Facebook and show Google's own guess at a snippet.

That is why `missing_description` is a warning even on a page with a full set of `og:` tags.

## Platforms cache aggressively

A preview here reflects your page **now**. What a platform shows reflects whenever it last crawled you, which can be days.

After fixing tags, most platforms need to be told to look again:

* Facebook and Instagram — the [Sharing Debugger](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/), "Scrape Again"
* LinkedIn — the [Post Inspector](https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/)
* X — re-share; the card is refetched on a schedule
* Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram — cache by URL for hours; a `?v=2` query parameter forces a fresh fetch

<Warning>
  If a preview here looks right but the platform still shows the old one, the tags are fixed and the platform is stale. Purge its cache rather than editing further.
</Warning>