Every link pasted into a chat gets fetched and rendered as a card: og:title is the headline, og:description the subline, og:image the picture. No tags means the platform guesses — usually your page title and a random image, which is how a careful article becomes an ugly grey rectangle.
The og:image is the piece that does the work: a 1200×630 card designed for the slot outperforms any auto-cropped screenshot. This is marketing surface, not metadata hygiene — in a chat full of links, the card with a real title and a real image is the one that gets opened.
Related terms
SEO
Search engine optimization — making pages findable, indexable and worth ranking: technical health plus content people actually want.
Structured data
Machine-readable markup — usually JSON-LD written in the schema.org vocabulary — that tells search and answer engines what the entities on a page are.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Raising the share of visitors who do the thing — buy, book, enquire — by fixing friction, not by buying more traffic.
