iMessage Open Graph Preview

iMessage draws a shared link as a rich bubble: the og:image filling the top, with a footer bar carrying a bold og:title over the bare domain. The bubble is heavily rounded with no visible border, so it reads as a message attachment rather than an embedded post.

iMessage ignores og:description entirely — the card shows the image, the title, and the domain only. A card whose meaning lives in the description renders here as a picture plus a headline, so the title has to make sense on its own.

When a message shows a bare URL instead of a bubble, the fetch failed rather than a tag being absent. iMessage generates the preview on the sender's device without executing JavaScript, so client-rendered tags are invisible to it. A login wall, an internal host, or an og:image it cannot reach leaves only the link text.

The fetch comes from the sender's own IP with a spoofed user agent that impersonates Facebook's and X's crawlers — so user-agent allow-lists aimed at those bots affect iMessage too, while robots.txt rules targeting Applebot have no effect on previews at all.

Set og:title and og:image in the page head, server-rendered — og:description is still worth setting for other platforms, but iMessage will not show it. Use an HTTPS image at 1200×630 when possible, keep it under 5 MB, and serve it without an avoidable redirect.

The scanner requests both the page and its image the way iMessage's fetcher does, so it can show whether the tags are reachable before you share the link.