LinkedIn Post Inspector is LinkedIn's free tool for checking how a URL will look when shared. Paste the URL at linkedin.com/post-inspector, click Inspect, and it shows the title, description and image LinkedIn found, plus when it last scraped the page. Inspecting also refreshes LinkedIn's cached copy, so after you fix your page's Open Graph tags, new posts pick up the corrected preview. Posts already published keep the old one.
LinkedIn Post Inspector is the official tool for fixing link previews on LinkedIn. People still search for a "LinkedIn debugger," the old name borrowed from Facebook's version, and it's the same job: you give it a URL, it shows you exactly what LinkedIn sees when someone shares that URL, and it forces LinkedIn to fetch the page again.
If your link preview shows no image, the wrong title, or an old description, Post Inspector will usually tell you why in under a minute. The fix is almost always on your website, in a handful of meta tags.
There's a second problem people search for with the same words, though. Sometimes the preview works perfectly and people still can't find your link. That one happened to me on the most important post of my year, and no inspector fixes it. I'll cover both.
The day nobody could find my link
When I launched Liftli on LinkedIn, I wanted everyone who read the launch post to be one tap away from the product.
I had put that launch off for a while. I built for months with fewer than 30 users, telling myself the MVP wasn't ready, and it was actually ready six weeks before I finally posted. So by launch day I had rehearsed the post itself many times. What I hadn't rehearsed was the reader's path from the post to the website.
So I built in three routes. I tagged the company page twice, once near the beginning of the post and once at the end. And I had the "visit my website" button set on my profile, right under my name, above the post. What I didn't do was paste my website URL into the post itself.
Right after I published, a friend messaged me: "Where is the link?"
I told him it was right there, at the top, and there were two company page tags. He said it wasn't clear enough. He was right. A company page tag is small blue text inside a paragraph, and it takes people to a LinkedIn page, which is still a scroll and a click away from your website. That doubles the friction. The profile button is easy to miss when you're reading the post and not the header above it.
I was fairly happy with the clicks the profile button got, until a short post later that week, with a plain link and a clear call to action at the end, pulled through a far bigger share of the people who saw it.
Same audience, same week. The difference was a visible link at the end of a short post, at the moment the reader had just finished and decided whether they cared. I keep coming back to that comparison, and I'll get to what I took from it. First, the part that has to work before any of it matters: the preview.
How to use LinkedIn Post Inspector, step by step
Before anything strategic, make sure the link itself renders properly. A broken preview card, a gray box with a bare URL, looks like spam and gets skipped. Here's the routine I use before sharing any new page.
- Go to linkedin.com/post-inspector and sign in if it asks.
- Paste the full URL of the page, including https, and click Inspect.
- Look at the preview at the top. That's what the card will look like in the feed.
- Scroll to the details: the title, description, image and URL LinkedIn picked up, and the time it last scraped the page. LinkedIn also shows the redirect trail, meaning every hop between the URL you pasted and the page it finally landed on.
- If something is wrong, fix it on your site (usually in the page's Open Graph tags), deploy, and click Inspect again. That second inspection makes LinkedIn fetch the page fresh.
- Only then write the post.
That last step matters because of how caching works. When a URL is shared, LinkedIn fetches the page and stores what it found. From what I've seen, it reuses that stored copy for a while instead of fetching again every time. So if you publish, notice the image is missing, and fix your site, the next post might still show the broken version. Post Inspector is how you tell LinkedIn to look again.
One thing it cannot do: change a post that's already live. The preview gets baked in when you publish. If the preview on a live post is broken and the post is only a few minutes old, I'd delete it, re-inspect, and post again. If it already has real engagement, leave it alone.
Why your LinkedIn link preview is not showing
These are the causes I've run into, roughly in order of how often they come up. Post Inspector surfaces most of them directly.
| What you see | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No image, just a title | No og:image tag, or the image URL is relative | Add an og:image with a full absolute URL starting with https |
| Wrong or generic title | Missing og:title, so LinkedIn falls back to something else on the page | Set og:title and og:description on every page you share |
| Old image or old text | LinkedIn is serving its cached copy | Fix the page, then click Inspect again in Post Inspector |
| Tiny or badly cropped image | Image is too small or an odd shape | Use roughly 1200 x 627 (about 1.91:1) |
| Nothing at all, bare URL | LinkedIn can't fetch the page: blocked in robots.txt, behind a login, or a firewall is rejecting its crawler | Allow LinkedIn's crawler (it identifies itself as LinkedInBot) and make the page public |
| Preview of the wrong page | A redirect chain or a link shortener | Share the final URL directly; check the redirect trail in Post Inspector |
| Tags are in your code but LinkedIn doesn't see them | The tags are added by JavaScript after the page loads | Put the tags in the server-rendered HTML |
| Card vanished after you added a photo | A LinkedIn post shows one attachment; adding an image or document replaces the link card | Pick one: the card or your own image |
The JavaScript one catches a lot of founders with modern web apps. Link-preview crawlers generally read the raw HTML the server sends and don't run your scripts. If your framework injects meta tags on the client, the browser sees them and LinkedIn doesn't. Post Inspector makes this obvious: your tags are in the page, and the inspector reports them missing.
For image dimensions across every LinkedIn placement, I keep a reference at LinkedIn image sizes, with a checker that reads your file's dimensions in the browser.
The meta tags LinkedIn actually reads
LinkedIn builds the preview from Open Graph tags, the same standard most platforms use. You need four in the <head> of the page:
og:title: the headline on the card. Keep it short enough to survive truncation.og:description: the line under it. LinkedIn often shows little or none of it in the feed, so don't put anything critical there.og:image: the full absolute URL of the image.og:url: the canonical URL of the page, so every variant of the link resolves to one preview.
If those four are present, public, and in the HTML the server returns, Post Inspector will almost always show a clean card. If you run a blog or a product site, it's worth running your five most-shared pages through the inspector once. It takes ten minutes, and a broken card is one of those problems nobody tells you about. They just scroll past.
It also matters beyond the feed. A lot of your links get shared in DMs and private messages, what marketers call dark social, and the card shows up there too. You never see those shares, so you never see them break.
Links in LinkedIn posts and reach: my take
Now the harder problem. My launch post had working links, and a friend who wanted to click still couldn't find one.
There's a widely repeated belief that LinkedIn shows posts with external links to fewer people. LinkedIn doesn't publish its ranking formula, so I can't give you a number, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who does. What I can say is that the incentive is obvious: LinkedIn makes money when you stay on LinkedIn. And the design matches the incentive. Tags are small. Profile buttons sit above the post, where nobody is looking once they start reading. Every path off the platform has a bit of friction added. (The LinkedIn algorithm post goes deeper on what's observable about ranking.)
The popular workaround is putting the link in the first comment. It's a reasonable hedge. My own two posts point somewhere more useful, though. I can't tell you whether the direct link cost that second post some reach, because I have no clean comparison. I can tell you that among the people who did see it, the visible link at the end got clicked about ten times as often as the button on my profile.
Here's how I read that. Most people on LinkedIn will never click anything, so the post has to work on its own. The few who will click decide at the end, once they've read the whole thing and decided they care. That's where the link belongs, in plain sight, with a sentence telling them why to click.
So this is how I handle links now:
- The post carries the full idea. If someone reads it and never leaves LinkedIn, they still got the point and they know what I do.
- When the click matters, the link goes at the end, visible, pointing straight to the page. No company page detour, no "link in bio" treasure hunt.
- One clear call to action. A short line that says what they'll get. Three hidden routes did worse than one obvious one.
- I check where the fold lands. If the reason to care is below the "see more" cut, most people never reach the link anyway. I use a post preview to see where desktop and mobile cut the text before I publish.
If you want the rest of that launch week's numbers, the funnel from visitors to signups, they're in my post on building in public in two hours a week.
A launch-day link checklist
If you're about to post something where the link really matters, a launch, an event, a hiring page, this is the short version:
- Run the URL through Post Inspector the day before. Fix the tags. Inspect again until the card looks right.
- Put one direct link to the page at the end of the post, with a sentence that says why to click. Skip the company page detour.
- Put the core message in the first two lines, so the post works for people who never click.
- Don't attach an image if you want the link card. You get one or the other.
- Be around for the first hour to answer comments, and reply to anyone asking for the link with the link.
- Afterwards, measure clicks per person reached. My profile button got more total clicks than the end-of-post link, because the launch post reached far more people. Per reader, the link at the end won by roughly ten times.
That last number changed how I write any post where the click matters. The post earns reach and attention on its own. The link, placed where a convinced reader will see it, converts the handful of people ready to act today.