Website metadata checker: read a page's head the way a crawler does.

Enter a URL and the tool fetches the page and lists what its markup declares: title, meta description, canonical, meta robots, Open Graph and Twitter card tags, the JSON-LD types it found, the h1 and the html lang attribute.

By · Updated September 25, 2026

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Website metadata checker

Runs on our server, which fetches the public URL you enter. We count runs and never save what you enter; an identical request may be answered from memory for up to five minutes.

What you can do with it

  • Check a page before launch for a leftover noindex or a canonical pointing at staging
  • Find out why a link shares on social with no image or the wrong title
  • Confirm the structured data you added actually made it into the live HTML
  • Audit a competitor's or a client's page head without opening developer tools

How it works, step by step

  1. 1

    Check the page that matters, as it is live

    Metadata is set per template, so a blog post, a product page and the homepage can each be wrong in a different way. Test one URL from each template you care about, on the production domain, not a preview link.

  2. 2

    Read the indexing tags first

    Look at meta robots and the canonical before anything else. A noindex, or a canonical pointing at another URL, overrides every other improvement on the page. If either is not what you intended, fix that first.

  3. 3

    Read the title and description as a searcher would

    Does the title say what the page is, in words someone would search? Does the description give a reason to click? Blank, duplicated or template-default values are the common failures.

  4. 4

    Check the share tags

    og:title, og:description and og:image decide what a link looks like when it is pasted into a chat or a social post. A missing og:image is the most visible gap. X falls back to Open Graph when its own card tags are missing, so fill Open Graph first and add twitter:card to choose the card layout.

  5. 5

    Confirm the structured data and the basics

    Check that the JSON-LD types you expect are listed, such as Organization, Article or Product, that there is a clear h1, and that the lang attribute matches the language the page is written in.

What the head of a page is for

Everything in a page’s head is an instruction or a description meant for software rather than readers. Three different audiences read it. Search engines use the title, description, canonical and robots tag to decide whether and how to show the page. Social platforms and chat apps use Open Graph and Twitter card tags to build the preview when someone shares a link. AI assistants and their crawlers read the same HTML, and structured data gives them the page’s facts in a form they do not have to guess at.

The checker lists all of it in one place, from the HTML the server sends, so you can see what each of those audiences actually receives.

What each tag does

  • Title. The strongest on-page hint about what the page is. Google shows it as the headline of the result most of the time, though it can rewrite it.
  • Meta description. A suggested snippet. Not a ranking signal, but it shapes the click.
  • Canonical. Names the preferred URL when the same content is reachable at more than one. It is a hint that search engines usually follow, not a command.
  • Meta robots. noindex keeps the page out of search results. nofollow asks crawlers not to follow its links.
  • Open Graph and Twitter card. The title, description and image used for link previews.
  • JSON-LD. Structured data describing the page or the business behind it. The schema generator writes valid blocks if a type you need is missing.
  • h1 and lang. The visible main heading, and the declared language of the page.

Common mistakes

  • noindex left over from staging. A staging site is set to noindex, and the setting ships to production with it. The page is live, working, and never indexed.
  • A canonical to the wrong URL. Pointing at the staging host, the http version, a redirected URL, or the homepage from every page. Each one tells search engines to index something else.
  • No og:image. The link shares as a bare text line, or the platform picks a random image from the page.
  • The same title and description on every page. A template default that was never replaced. The meta description generator helps write distinct ones.
  • Metadata added only by JavaScript. It exists in the browser and nowhere else that matters.

What it does not do

The checker reads one page’s markup. It does not score the page, check whether the page ranks, validate structured data property by property, or crawl the rest of the site. For a whole-domain view of the signals AI assistants rely on, the free AI-readiness check runs nine checks on a domain’s public configuration, including title, description, one h1 and Organization schema.

Correct metadata is the frame; the content is what gets cited. AltoRank plans and drafts that content every week, and a person approves each piece before it publishes.

Frequently asked questions

What does the checker read?

The HTML the server returns for the URL, before any JavaScript runs. It reports the title, meta description, canonical, meta robots, Open Graph and Twitter card tags, the JSON-LD @types it found, the h1 headings and the html lang attribute.

Why is a tag I added missing from the result?

Usually because it is added by JavaScript after the page loads. The checker reads the raw HTML, which is what many crawlers read. Google renders JavaScript later and may pick up the tag, but most AI crawlers and social preview fetchers do not run scripts. Put metadata in the server-rendered HTML.

Is having more than one h1 a problem?

Not as a penalty. Google has said multiple h1 headings are fine. It is a clarity question: one h1 that states what the page is about is easier for people, screen readers and machines to read than several competing ones.

Does the meta description affect rankings?

Google does not use it as a ranking signal, and it often writes its own snippet from the page text. It still matters because a good description is used as the snippet often enough to affect whether people click, and because assistants and social previews read it too.

Does it validate my structured data?

No. It lists the JSON-LD @types present in the page so you can confirm they are there. It does not check each property against Google's requirements for rich results. Use Google's Rich Results Test for that.

Does it store the URL I check?

No. Our server fetches the public page, returns the result to your browser and keeps only a count of how many times the tool ran that day. There is a daily usage limit so the tool can stay free without a signup.

More free tools

Free Canonical Tag Checker: Test Any URL Enter a URL to see the canonical it declares, whether it points to itself or elsewhere, and whether the canonical target resolves. Free Meta Description Generator With SERP Preview Meta descriptions that survive Google's rewriting: the length that displays, and five patterns that work. Free FAQ Schema Generator (JSON-LD, Article, Breadcrumb) Generate valid Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList JSON-LD, and the one rule that keeps it from backfiring. Free AI Crawler Simulator: See What GPTBot Sees Fetch any URL as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot. See each robots.txt verdict, status code and the text in the raw HTML.
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