How do I find which pages are missing og:image?

Read the page list from sitemap.xml, request each page the way a preview bot does, and look for a meta tag with property og:image in the HTML the server returns. The curl loop in this guide prints each URL with its og:image or MISSING. CardScope’s site audit does the same from a sitemap: free checks the first 3 pages, Pro checks up to 50 and downloads a CSV.

Why do only some pages have a share image?

Usually because the image comes from a per-page field, like a featured image or a product photo, and pages without that field get nothing. Set a site-wide default og:image in the template and let a page’s own image override it.

Is one og:image for every page good enough?

It is far better than none, because every link then shows a picture. A page-specific image is better for pages people share a lot, like posts and products. Keep the default as the fallback.

What does a CardScope site audit cost?

A free audit reads the sitemap and checks the first 3 pages. Pro is $19 once via Stripe Checkout, checks up to 50 pages per audit, and downloads a CSV. No account. We read each page in memory and don’t save it.

Guide

Find every page missing og:image

A missing share image is rarely one page. It is usually a template that only prints og:image when a page has a featured image, a product photo, or a custom field, so every page without one goes out as a bare link. The fast fix is to find the pattern across the site, then fix the template once.

What to check on each page

Preview bots read the HTML your server sends. They do not run your JavaScript (see JavaScript and SPA previews). For each page, look for:

og:image is present. Without it, most apps show no picture.
It is an absolute https URL. A relative path like /img/share.png is a common reason the picture is missing. See absolute OG image URLs.
The image actually loads. A deleted file, a private bucket, or a hotlink rule returns an error instead of an image.
Size and format. 1200×630 is the usual large card. Use JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WebP, not SVG. See image size and image format.
og:title and og:description. Without them apps fall back to the page title or the raw URL. See title and description.
twitter:card. summary_large_image is the usual large card on X. See Twitter Card types.

Check a whole site with curl

If your site has a sitemap.xml, this loop prints each page with its og:image, or MISSING. It sends a Slackbot-style user agent so you see what a preview bot gets, not what your browser gets.

curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml \
  | grep -o '<loc>[^<]*' | sed 's/<loc>//' \
  | while read -r u; do
      img=$(curl -sL -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Slackbot-LinkExpanding 1.0)' "$u" \
        | grep -io '<meta[^>]*property="og:image"[^>]*>' | head -1 \
        | sed -E 's/.*content="([^"]*)".*/\1/I')
      printf '%s\t%s\n' "$u" "${img:-MISSING}"
    done

It is a rough check. It expects property before content and double quotes, it does not follow a sitemap index into its child sitemaps, and it does not test that the image loads. To test one image, run curl -sI on its URL and look for a 200 and an image/ content type.

If your robots.txt has a Sitemap: line, start from that URL. If the site has no sitemap, list a handful of pages by type (home, a post, a product, a category, a tag page) and check those, because templates differ by page type.

Read the result by page type

Sort the output by URL pattern. The pattern tells you which template to fix:

Posts with no featured image are missing, posts with one are fine. The theme only prints the post’s image. Add a site-wide default.
Category, tag, archive, or search pages are missing. These templates often skip social tags entirely.
Every page shows the same image. That works, but posts and products people share often deserve their own image.
Every page is missing, even though you set the tags. The tags may be added by JavaScript, or a bot rule may be answering the crawler. See crawler blocked.

Fix it once, in the template

Print og:image on every page: the page’s own image when it has one, a site-wide default when it doesn’t. Make the default a 1200×630 PNG or JPEG at an absolute https URL. The image resizer crops one to size, and the tag generator writes the tags. Site builders have their own default-image setting: see WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, Ghost, Jekyll, Hugo, and Eleventy. For frameworks, see Open Graph tags by framework.

Then run the check again. Apps that already stored a card for a URL keep it until they re-fetch, so a fixed page can still show the old card in Slack, LinkedIn, or Facebook for a while. See clear the OG cache.

Let CardScope do the loop

The site audit takes a site or a sitemap.xml address. It reads the Sitemap: line in robots.txt, or /sitemap.xml, and follows a sitemap index one level down. For each page it reports whether og:title, og:description, and og:image are set, whether the image URL is absolute, whether it loads, size or format problems, whether twitter:card is set, and what to fix. A free audit checks the first 3 pages and lists the rest. Pro checks up to 50 pages per audit and downloads the table as a CSV. Pro is $19 once, and it also unlocks the card previews and fix checklist on the page check.