Open Graph (OG) is a metadata protocol — originally developed by Facebook — that enables web pages to define how they appear when shared on social media and when fetched by bots. Open Graph tags in HTML <head> specify a page’s title, description, image, URL, and content type.
Open Graph and AI crawlers
AI crawlers that fetch pages for metadata (rather than full content parsing) read Open Graph tags as a quick summary of page content. While OG tags are primarily a social sharing protocol, they serve a secondary function in AI content understanding:
og:title: Summarizes what the page is about — feeds into title-based relevance scoringog:description: A concise content summary — often more descriptive than the HTML title tagog:type: Signals content type (article,website,product) — affects how the page is categorizedog:image: The image crawlers associate with the page — relevant as multimodal AI grows
Key Open Graph tags for AEO
<meta property="og:title" content="[Descriptive page title with primary keyword]" />
<meta property="og:description" content="[1-2 sentence direct summary of the page's core claim]" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="[canonical URL]" />
<meta property="og:image" content="[URL of representative image]" />
Best practices
Don’t duplicate your <title> tag: OG title and HTML title can differ — OG title can be longer and more descriptive since it’s not constrained by SERP display limits.
Write OG descriptions as standalone summaries: A reader (or bot) reading only the OG description should understand what the page proves or explains. “A guide to X” is weaker than “Why X happens and how to fix it in 3 steps.”
Keep images appropriately sized: 1200×630px is the recommended minimum for OG images. Blurry or missing OG images reduce click-through from social shares and may affect crawler confidence in page quality.