Four methods — from fastest to most thorough
- Online checker: paste the URL into a free metadata checker. Done in seconds and shows the social preview — but one page at a time.
- View source: right-click → View Page Source. Every tag lives in the head section. Free, but manual.
- Terminal: fetch the HTML with curl and filter out the meta tags. Scriptable and perfect for quick checks.
- CI automation: validate title, description and canonical on every deploy so errors never reach visitors.
# See every meta tag on one page $ curl -s https://yoursite.com | grep -o '<meta[^>]*>' | head -20 # Just the title and description $ curl -s https://yoursite.com | grep -Eo '<title>.*</title>|name="description" content="[^"]*"'
What a healthy set of meta tags looks like
| Tag | Rule of thumb |
|---|---|
| <title> | 30–60 characters, unique per page, most important words first |
| meta description | 120–158 characters, concrete message plus a reason to click |
| canonical | Exactly one per page, self-referencing (absolute URL) |
| og:title / og:description / og:image | Mirror title/description; image at least 1200x630 |
| robots | Only present when you want to discourage indexing |
Read next
Also read: broken link checkers, check redirect chains and technical SEO checks.
Frequently asked questions
Which meta tags matter most for SEO?
The title tag and meta description are the big two: they form the text in the search result. Canonical, hreflang and robots meta control indexing, while Open Graph and Twitter tags mainly affect how the page looks when shared.
Why does Facebook show the wrong image when I share my page?
Almost always missing or cached Open Graph data. Verify that og:image, og:title and og:description exist and that the image is at least 1200x630 px, then force a re-scrape in the sharing debugger after fixing.
Can I check meta tags without a tool?
Yes — right-click and choose View Page Source, or use curl. All meta tags live in the head section. It's fast for one page but impractical when auditing a whole site.
How do I monitor meta tags automatically?
Run a script in CI that fetches each important page and validates that title, description and canonical exist with sensible lengths. That catches mistakes before release instead of after.
Related: Broken link checkers · Redirect chains · Technical SEO checks