OpenGraph | ScrapeRouter

OpenGraph is a set of HTML meta tags that tells platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord how a page should look when someone shares its URL. It controls things like the title, description, image, and canonical URL used in link previews, which makes it a common target when scraping page metadata.

Examples

OpenGraph tags live in the HTML <head> of a page:\n\nhtml\n<meta property="og:title" content="Scrape product pages without babysitting proxies" />\n<meta property="og:description" content="Unified scraping API with proxy routing, browser rendering, and anti-bot handling." />\n<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/preview.jpg" />\n<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/product/123" />\n<meta property="og:type" content="website" />\n\n\nA scraper pulling OpenGraph data from a page might return something like this:\n\njson\n{\n "title": "Scrape product pages without babysitting proxies",\n "description": "Unified scraping API with proxy routing, browser rendering, and anti-bot handling.",\n "image": "https://example.com/preview.jpg",\n "url": "https://example.com/product/123",\n "type": "website"\n}\n

Practical tips

Check the raw HTML first: OpenGraph tags are often present in the initial response, which means you may not need full browser rendering just to get title, image, and description.\n- Don’t trust them as product data: OpenGraph is for previews, not structured extraction. Good for quick metadata, bad for prices, stock, variants, or anything operational.\n- Watch for incomplete tags: Some sites set og:title and og:image but skip og:description or og:url, so your scraper should handle missing fields cleanly.\n- Normalize relative URLs: Images and URLs should be resolved against the page URL before you store them.\n- Compare with other metadata when quality matters: Twitter Card tags, standard meta description, and page <title> often disagree. In production, that happens a lot more than people expect.

Use cases

Link preview generation: Build unfurling for chat apps, internal tools, or CMS workflows by extracting og:title, og:description, and og:image.\n- Fast page enrichment: When you just need a decent summary of a URL, OpenGraph is often the cheapest thing to scrape.\n- Content deduping and QA: Compare og:url and canonical tags to catch duplicate pages or bad metadata setups.\n- Monitoring publisher metadata: If you track how pages appear when shared on social platforms, OpenGraph is the first place to look.