Questions people ask first
Mostly about what happens to the pages you paste in, and about what a score does and does not mean.
- Is the audit free?
- Yes. Paste a URL and you get every check, the value found on the page, and the problem named and ranked — at no cost and without an account. The $4.99 unlock adds the replacement markup for each issue, a CSV export and a printable report.
- Do you store the pages I audit?
- The fetched HTML is parsed in memory and discarded. Audit results live in your own browser so you can reopen them, and the shareable result link is not indexed by search engines.
- Why does my link preview still look wrong after I fix the tags?
- Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and X all cache the first version of a card they see, often for days. Fixing the markup does not clear their cache. The audit tells you the tags are now correct; getting the platform to re-read them is a separate step, and each platform has its own way of forcing it.
- Does it run JavaScript?
- No. The page is fetched server-side and parsed as HTML, with no browser and no script execution. That is what makes an audit fast and cheap, and it is the tool's main limitation: tags injected on the client after load are invisible to it. Most social scrapers do not run JavaScript either, so what MetaTagAuditor sees is close to what they see.
- Can I audit a page behind a login?
- No. The crawler sends no cookies and no credentials, so anything requiring a session returns the logged-out page or an error. Staging sites behind HTTP auth or an IP allowlist are unreachable for the same reason.
- Will a perfect score make my page rank?
- No, and any tool that says otherwise is selling something. The score describes the meta tags on one page. Ranking depends mostly on what the page says and who links to it. A clean audit means search engines and social platforms can read your page correctly — that is a floor, not a ranking strategy.
- How is this different from Google's own tools?
- Search Console reports on pages Google has already crawled from a site you have verified. MetaTagAuditor reads any public URL immediately, including a competitor's or a client's, and covers the social card tags Search Console does not report on at all.
Still unclear on the mechanics? How it works walks through the fetch, the 18 checks and how the score is calculated.