Free meta tag checker
Meta tags tell search engines and social platforms what your page is. Enter a URL to see its title, description, canonical, robots and Open Graph tags — with their actual values, their lengths and a verdict on each one.
What each verdict means
Every tag gets one of three results. Pass means present and within the range that displays properly. Fail means absent when it should not be, or actively harmful — a noindexdirective on a page you want found is the clearest example. Review is a genuine third state rather than a softened failure: a 68-character title is present and correct but will be truncated in results, which is a different problem from having no title at all.
The lengths matter more than they look. A title cut off mid-word costs you the end of your own sentence in the one place a searcher decides whether to click, and it is invisible from your own site — you only see it in the results page, which is why it survives for years unnoticed.
The tag that breaks sites
A noindex robots tag is the most common single reason a page is missing from Google. It gets left behind after a staging deploy, inherited from a template, or switched on by a plugin setting nobody remembers changing — and the page looks completely normal to every human who visits it. Checking the tag directly is the only way to rule it out, and it takes one lookup.
If a page is missing from search and its robots tag is clean, the cause is somewhere else: the domain may be too new, the page may be orphaned with no internal links, or the site may not be submitted at all. Our guide on why a website is not showing up on Google works through the causes in order of likelihood.
Why the social tags are here
Open Graph and Twitter card tags do not affect rankings, and they are on this list anyway, because the cost of getting them wrong is immediate and measurable. A link shared into a Slack channel or a LinkedIn post either renders as a card with a headline and an image, or as a bare gray URL. The difference in clicks between those two is not subtle, and the fix is four tags.
One specific trap: og:image must be an absolute URL. A relative path works in a browser and fails on most platforms, so the preview looks right when you test it locally and breaks everywhere it counts. This tool flags that case separately from a missing tag.
Where this fits
Metadata is one layer. A page with perfect tags can still fail on the things that actually determine whether people reach it — how fast it loads, whether it passes Core Web Vitals, whether it is served over HTTPS with sensible security headers, whether its markup is accessible, whether it has structured data, and whether AI assistants can read it at all. The free website audit checks those together and scores the result, and what counts as a good score explains how to read the number it gives you.
Meta tag questions
- What are meta tags?
- Meta tags are HTML elements in a page's head that describe the page to search engines and social platforms rather than to the visitor. The important ones are the title, the meta description, the canonical URL, the robots directive and the Open Graph tags that control how a shared link looks.
- How long should a title tag be?
- Keep a title tag under 60 characters. Google measures the available space in pixels rather than characters, so 60 is an approximation — but it reliably keeps the whole title visible in desktop results, and anything past roughly 70 will definitely be cut off.
- How long should a meta description be?
- Aim for 70 to 160 characters. Under 70 leaves usable space on the results page unclaimed; past 160 the end of your sentence gets truncated. Google rewrites descriptions often, but a good one is still the version it starts from.
- Does the meta description affect rankings?
- The meta description is not a ranking factor and has not been one for years. It affects clicks, which is a different thing that still matters — the description is your sales line in the results page, and Google will write a worse one from your page text if you leave it out.
- What does a noindex robots tag do?
- A noindex robots tag tells search engines not to list the page in results at all. It is the single most common reason a page is missing from Google, and because the page looks completely normal to a visitor, it is usually found only by checking the tag directly — which this tool does.
- Do I need Open Graph tags?
- Open Graph tags control the headline, summary and image shown when your link is shared on Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook or X. Without them each platform guesses from the page, usually badly. They do not affect rankings, but a link that renders as a bare URL gets noticeably fewer clicks.
- What is a canonical URL for?
- A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the authoritative version of a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. It should be an absolute URL including the protocol and domain — relative canonicals are a common and easily missed mistake.
- Why is my title tag not showing in Google search results?
- Google frequently rewrites the title shown in results when it judges your tag to be unclear, keyword-stuffed or a poor match for the query. If the displayed title differs from your tag, tighten the tag so it is concise, unique and accurately describes the page — Google is more likely to keep a title it considers a good fit.
- Why did Google change my title tag?
- Google may replace your title in the results when the original was too long, duplicated across pages, padded with keywords, or when the page's H1 described the content better. It always chooses from real text on the page, so the fix is to make your title tag itself the clearest, most honest summary of the page.
- What is the difference between a title tag and an H1?
- The title tag lives in the page head and is what shows in the browser tab and search results, while the H1 is the main visible heading on the page itself. They can differ, and often should — the title is written for someone scanning a results page, the H1 for someone who has already arrived.
- How many meta keywords should I use?
- None — the meta keywords tag is obsolete and Google has ignored it for over a decade, so filling it in does nothing for ranking. Worse, it publicly exposes the terms you are targeting to competitors, so the modern advice is to leave it out entirely.
- What is the meta viewport tag for?
- The meta viewport tag tells a mobile browser how to size and scale the page, and without it a responsive layout will not work correctly on phones. Because Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, a missing or misconfigured viewport tag can hurt both usability and rankings.