What startup homepages look like when you share the link
We fetched 271 startup and SaaS homepages the way LinkedIn, X, Slack, WhatsApp and iMessage do, and checked what a pasted link would turn into.
66%
of the 261 homepages we could fetch give a pasted link everything it needs for a large preview card. The other 89 fall short.
- Ready for a large card 172
- Image right, other tags missing 14
- Image loads, wrong size or shape 48
- Image declared, does not load 1
- No preview image 26
What a pasted link turns into
Each homepage counted once, in the first state that applies.
- yourstartup.com
66% 172 of 261
Ready for a large card
Title, description and a 1.91:1 image of at least 1200 pixels, plus the X tag that asks for the large card.
- yourstartup.com
18% 48 of 261
Image loads, wrong size or shape
The image loads but is cropped, letterboxed or too small to show large.
- yourstartup.com
10% 26 of 261
No preview image
No og:image, so most apps fall back to a small text card or a bare link.
-
5% 14 of 261
Image right, other tags missing
The image is right, but a title, description or the X card tag is missing, or the image URL is relative.
- yourstartup.com
0% 1 of 261
Image declared, does not load
The og:image URL points somewhere the apps cannot reach.
The tags are there. The image is where it slips.
Each check counted on its own, out of 261 homepages. Text tags are close to universal; the drop comes at the image's size and shape.
-
og:title93% -
og:description93% -
og:image declared90% -
og:image loads as an image90% -
og:image is an absolute URL89% -
At least 1200 pixels wide82% -
Close to 1.91:173% -
twitter:card summary_large_image85%
Every share image, drawn to scale
The 234 og:images that loaded, each outlined at its real pixel size from the same corner, against the 1200 by 630 frame. 119 are exactly that size.
- Median width
- 1200px
- Narrower than 1200px
- 20
- Outside the 1.91:1 band
- 44
- At least 1200 × 630
- 201
- SVG, which X does not take
- 2
- Relative image URL
- 3
Formats of the images that loaded: PNG 158, JPEG 63, WebP 10, SVG 2, GIF 1.
The smaller tags
What decides the card on X, the icon in Slack and iMessage, and the words under the image.
summary_large_image | 221 | 85% |
|---|---|---|
summary (small card) | 15 | 6% |
Not set | 25 | 10% |
| Favicon declared | 250 | 96% |
|---|---|---|
| apple-touch-icon | 163 | 62% |
| Canonical link | 224 | 86% |
| og:url | 198 | 76% |
| og:site_name | 141 | 54% |
| og:image:alt (of those with an image) | 86 | 37% |
| Median title tag | 48 characters | |
|---|---|---|
| Title over 60 characters | 39 | 15% |
| og:title same as title tag | 209 of 244 | 86% |
| og:description same as meta description | 206 of 240 | 86% |
Seed-stage sites miss the image most
Established SaaS against startups funded in the last year, then the startups by round. The Series B group is small.
| Group | Homepages | Large card ready | No og:image | Image loads | X large card tag | apple-touch-icon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS | 104 | 74% | 1% | 99% | 88% | 62% |
| Funded startup | 157 | 61% | 16% | 83% | 83% | 63% |
| Funded startups by round | Homepages | Large card ready | No og:image |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 103 | 54% | 22% |
| Series A | 41 | 68% | 5% |
| Series B | 13 | 85% | 0% |
What to do about it
A link preview is often the first time someone sees your brand: in a founder's LinkedIn post, a sales email forwarded into Slack, an investor's WhatsApp. It takes five tags and one image to get right, and it stays right until someone redesigns the homepage.
- Make one image at 1200 by 630. PNG or JPEG, under 5 MB, with the important part away from the edges. Export at 2400 by 1260 if you want it sharp on retina screens.
- Use an absolute https URL. Not a relative path, and never a localhost address left over from development.
- Set
twitter:cardtosummary_large_image. Without it X can show a small square card instead. - Write og:title and og:description for a feed. They don't have to repeat the title tag; most of these homepages copy it word for word.
- Declare an apple-touch-icon. iMessage and Slack use the site icon next to the card.
To see your own card, paste your URL into our free social preview checker. If the image is the problem, that's part of what we design in brand identity work.
How we did it
The sample is the 110 SaaS companies from our AI search readiness audit and the 161 startups that raised a seed, Series A or Series B round in the year to October 2026 from our homepage copy study, with no overlap between the two.
A script fetched each homepage once, without running JavaScript, the way link preview crawlers do, with a user
agent that names us. It read the Open Graph and Twitter tags, title, meta description, canonical and icon
links, then requested the og:image and read its pixel size from the first bytes of the file. Images were
requested with a plain */* accept header, so image CDNs served the format a crawler would get.
10 homepages refused our labelled request or did not answer, which leaves 261. One snapshot, fetched on 18 October 2026 from India. The platforms' own crawlers may be let in where we were not, and each app has its own cache and rules, so this measures what the tags ask for, not every app's final render.
