You can't change someone else's link preview

The card that appears when you share a link is built from meta tags on the destination page. If you don’t control that page, you can’t change what the card says. There’s no field on the sharing side that overrides it, and platforms removed the ones that used to exist.

This comes up constantly — someone shares an article and wants a different image, or a colleague’s link previews badly and they want to fix it from their end. The answer is the same in every case, and it’s worth understanding why.

Why it works that way

The preview is a summary of the destination, so the destination declares it. If the sharer could override it, a link could be made to look like it points somewhere it doesn’t — which is precisely the mechanism of a phishing link.

Platforms learned this. Facebook allowed editing link previews in posts, and removed it in 2017 for this exact reason. The general direction across platforms has been toward the destination being authoritative.

So the constraint isn’t an oversight. It’s the feature.

What you can actually do

If you control the page: fix the tags. That’s the whole answer, and every other post here is about it.

If you don’t control the page but know someone who does: ask them. A missing og:image is a two-minute fix for whoever owns the site, and they usually don’t know it’s broken.

If you can’t get it changed: share the link with your own text around it. Most platforms show your post text above the card, and a good sentence does more work than the card anyway. On some platforms you can post without a preview at all — by omitting the link from the body and putting it elsewhere, or disabling the preview where the client offers it — and rely on your own description.

Quote or screenshot instead. If the point is a specific passage or figure, an image of it plus a plain link communicates better than a card built from someone else’s homepage.

That’s the complete list. Anything else being offered as a solution is doing something else.

The shortener case, honestly

Some link shorteners let you set a preview on the short URL. The short URL serves its own tags to crawlers and redirects real browsers to the destination, so the card comes from the shortener’s page rather than the destination’s.

This does technically let you put any card on any link. Which is exactly why it needs a boundary:

Legitimate: customising the preview for content you own. A different title for a different audience, a correctly sized image for one platform, without editing the page. The card still accurately describes where the link goes.

Not legitimate: putting a card on a link to a page you don’t control, or a card that misrepresents where the link leads. That’s the phishing pattern, and it’s why platforms treat shortened links with elevated suspicion in the first place — every misuse makes shortened links slightly less trusted for everyone using them.

The rule is simple enough to state in one line: only override previews for destinations you control, and keep the card true to the page.

When your own preview looks wrong and you do control the page

Worth ruling these out before concluding you’re stuck:

The card is cached. Your tags are right and the platform is showing an old render. Use the platform’s debug tool to force a refresh.

The tags are client-side. Crawlers usually don’t run JavaScript, so tags injected after load are invisible. Check with curl, which doesn’t run JavaScript either.

The tags are on the wrong page. A redirect means the crawler read the tags at the final destination, not the URL you shared.

The image is unreachable. Correct tag, but the image is behind hotlink protection, requires authentication, or is too large. The card renders without it.

A template is overriding. Some site builders and plugins emit their own Open Graph tags in addition to yours, and the first or last one wins depending on the parser. Check for duplicates in the served HTML.

Each of those looks like “I can’t change my preview” and is actually a fixable problem on your side.

The short version

The destination page owns its preview. If it’s your page, fix the tags. If it isn’t, ask the owner or write better text around the link. And if you’re using a tool that lets you set previews on links, confine it to your own content — the reason the ability is unusual is the reason it needs restraint.