What Meta Tag Checker analyses
Meta tags are the small fragments of HTML in the <head> of every web page. You never see them on screen, but they do a lot of quiet work: they tell Google what your page is called and what it's about, they decide how your link looks when someone pastes it into Slack or Facebook, and they control whether a page gets indexed at all. Most of the time they're fine. Occasionally one is missing, too long, duplicated, or pointing at the wrong URL — and that's exactly the kind of problem that costs you clicks without ever throwing an error.
Paste any URL into the checker above and we fetch the live page, parse the HTML the same way a search engine would, and report back on every element that matters for on-page SEO. Here's what each section of the report is looking at, and why it's worth getting right.
The tags that show up in search results
Title tag
The <title> is the single most important on-page SEO element. It's the clickable headline in Google's results, the label on the browser tab, and the default name used when someone bookmarks the page. We check that it exists, measure its length, and flag it if it falls outside the 30–60 character sweet spot. Too short and you're wasting space you could use to describe the page; too long and Google truncates it with an ellipsis, often cutting off your most important words. For a full breakdown, see our guide to title tag best practices.
Meta description
The meta description is the grey snippet of text beneath your title in search results. It isn't a direct ranking factor, but it's effectively ad copy — a well-written description lifts click-through rate, and a missing one leaves Google to scrape a random sentence from your page. We grade it against the 120–160 character range, which is roughly what Google displays before truncating. Learn how to write one that earns clicks in our meta description guide.
To make the abstract concrete, the report renders a live Google-style preview showing how your title, URL, and description would actually appear in the results page — so you can spot a truncated title or a weak description before it goes live.
The tags that control social sharing
When someone shares your link on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, or X, the rich preview card — the image, headline, and blurb — is built entirely from Open Graph and Twitter Card tags. Get them wrong and your link shows up as a bare URL or pulls in the wrong image, which quietly kills the share. The checker reports every og: and twitter: tag it finds and flags the four Open Graph essentials every page should have: og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url. Our Open Graph guide and Twitter Cards guide cover image dimensions and the full tag set.
The technical tags
These don't appear in search results, but they tell crawlers how to treat the page:
- Canonical URL — declares the "official" version of a page so duplicate URLs (tracking parameters, trailing-slash variants, HTTP vs HTTPS) consolidate their ranking signal instead of competing. We surface it and flag when it's missing. See canonical tags explained.
- Viewport — the one-line tag that makes a page render correctly on phones. Its absence is a red flag for mobile-friendliness, and Google indexes the mobile version of your site first.
- Robots — directives like
noindexandnofollowthat decide whether the page is allowed into the index at all. An accidentalnoindexis one of the most damaging and easily-missed SEO mistakes; our robots meta tag guide covers the directives in full. - Charset and language — the character encoding and declared
langattribute, which affect how text renders and how search engines target your content regionally.
On-page structure
Heading hierarchy
We count your <h1> and <h2> tags and show samples. A page should have exactly one H1 — it's the page's main heading and a strong relevance signal. Zero H1s leaves the page's topic ambiguous; multiple H1s dilute it. The H2s should form a logical outline beneath it. More on this in our heading hierarchy guide.
Image alt text
The report audits every <img> on the page and counts how many are missing alt attributes. Alt text is what screen readers announce, what shows when an image fails to load, and what helps images rank in Google Images. Missing alt text is both an accessibility gap and a missed SEO opportunity — see how to write image alt text.
How the grade is calculated
Every check rolls up into a single letter grade from A to F, scored out of a weighted total so the elements that matter most carry the most weight:
- Title tag — 2 points (present, and within the ideal length)
- Meta description — 2 points (present, and within the ideal length)
- Open Graph tags — 2 points (all four essentials present)
- Viewport — 1 point
- Canonical URL — 1 point
- Single H1 — 1 point
- Image alt text — 1 point (no images missing alt)
Your score is the percentage of points earned: 90%+ is an A, 75% a B, 55% a C, 35% a D, and anything below that an F. Alongside the grade you get a plain-English list of exactly what to fix — not "improve your meta tags," but "title tag is too long (68 chars)" or "2 of 9 images missing alt text." The point is to give you a specific, actionable to-do list, not a vague score.
How to use the results
The fastest workflow is to run a check the moment you publish or update a page — it's a ten-second sanity test that catches the most common mistakes before they reach Google. Work down the issues list from top to bottom; the checks are ordered by impact, so fixing the first few moves the needle most. Re-run the check after you deploy your fixes to confirm the grade has improved.
For an existing site, spot-check your most important pages first: the homepage, your top landing pages, and your best-performing blog posts. If a template is wrong — a missing viewport tag, a hard-coded canonical, no Open Graph block — it's usually wrong across every page built from that template, so one fix can lift dozens of URLs at once. If you're new to any of this, the complete guide to meta tags walks through every tag from scratch, and the tag reference and glossary are there whenever you hit a term you don't recognise.
The tool is free, unlimited, and requires no signup — run as many pages as you like. Have a question we haven't answered here? The complete guide to meta tags goes deeper, or get in touch and we'll help.