What it is
og:title (short for "Open Graph title") is a specific meta tag, <meta property="og:title" content="...">, that tells social platforms and messaging apps exactly what headline to show when someone shares a link to your page. Open Graph is a shared standard originally created by Facebook that most major platforms — Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, and others — now use to build the preview card shown for a shared link.
Without it, most platforms will fall back to using your regular page title instead, which often works out fine — but it means you have no separate control over what specifically appears in that shared context if you'd want it to read differently.
Why it matters
When a link is shared, the preview card (headline, description, and image together) is often the only information someone sees before deciding whether to click — they haven't visited your site yet, so this preview is doing all the persuading. Relying entirely on the fallback behavior means giving up control over one of the highest-impact pieces of text your page has, in exactly the context where first impressions matter the most.
Setting og:title explicitly also protects against a fallback grabbing something unintended — some platforms fall back to a generic site name or an oddly truncated version of your title if this tag isn't present.
How to fix it
- Write a specific, compelling headline for how you'd want this page to look when shared, similar in spirit to your title tag but written to catch attention specifically in a social feed.
- Add
<meta property="og:title" content="Your headline here">inside the page's<head>section. - If you're using a website builder (Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, WordPress with an SEO plugin), look for a "Social Share" or "Open Graph" settings section on that page rather than editing code directly.
- Test the result using Facebook's free Sharing Debugger tool or LinkedIn's Post Inspector, both of which show exactly how your link will preview.
- Re-run your Launch Readiness check to confirm the tag is now detected.