How to check the meta tags of any website

Every page's search snippet and social preview come from a handful of tags in its head. Here is how to read them on any site, without installing anything.

1. In the browser (any page, no install)

Open the page, press F12 (Mac: Cmd+Option+J) for the Console, paste this and press Enter:

const seo = /^(description|robots|googlebot|viewport|og:|twitter:)/;
console.table([
  { tag: "title", value: document.title },
  { tag: "canonical", value: document.querySelector("link[rel=canonical]")?.href ?? "(none)" },
  ...[...document.querySelectorAll("meta[name], meta[property]")]
    .map(e => ({ tag: e.getAttribute("name") || e.getAttribute("property"), value: e.content }))
    .filter(r => seo.test(r.tag)),
]);

It prints a table with the title, the canonical URL and every description, robots, viewport, Open Graph (og:) and Twitter tag. On github.com it lists 16 tags and skips dozens of app-internal meta tags that do not matter for search. Chrome may ask you to type allow pasting before the first paste.

2. What crawlers and social previews see (curl)

curl -sL https://example.com/ | grep -ioE '<meta[^>]*(og:|twitter:|"description")[^>]*>'

The console shows the page after JavaScript has run. Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and most other link-preview bots read only the HTML the server sends, so Open Graph tags must be in that HTML. If the console shows a tag that curl does not, the tag is added by JavaScript and previews will miss it.

3. What to look for

• title: present, unique per page, with the main topic first. Search results cut long titles.
• description: present and specific to the page. Google may write its own snippet, but a good description is often used.
• canonical: points to this page's preferred URL, not the home page or another page.
• robots: no noindex on pages you want found (see how to check noindex).
• og:title, og:description, og:image: set, so shared links show a title, text and picture.

Every page of a site at once

Our SEO Audit Crawler on Apify checks every page it reaches for missing, too long or too short titles and meta descriptions, missing or misplaced canonicals, noindex, missing Open Graph tags and viewport, and lists duplicate titles and descriptions across the site, as CSV, Excel or JSON. Billed per audited page.

Written with AI assistance. The console snippet was run with Chromium on github.com and example.com, and the curl command on bbc.com/news and github.com, on 2026-10-01. The Apify tool is ours; the APIs are free to call directly.