Why LinkPeek is like this

What was broken

A link looks fine right up until somebody shares it and the preview comes back blank, cropped, or showing last month's title. By then the card is out in a group chat, and caches will keep serving the wrong one for a while.

The existing answer is to guess. Read your own og: tags and imagine what six different apps will do with them, or deploy to a preview branch just to look at a thumbnail. The tools that do render something mostly show a generic card that no real app draws.

And the moment you most want to check is the moment you cannot: while the page is still on localhost, unshipped, which used to mean standing up an ngrok tunnel to test a picture.

Who it’s for

• Anyone about to post a launch link where the preview is the first impression
• Developers who want to check a card before deploying, from localhost
• People debugging a card that is already wrong and cached

Who it isn’t for

• Anyone wanting bulk SEO auditing. This is about the share card, not the ranking
• Anyone who needs the platforms' own debuggers for cache invalidation, which is a different job

Rules we don’t break

Decided once, so they never have to be argued about again.

• Show the card, not the tags. A list of meta tags is homework. A pixel-accurate WhatsApp bubble is an answer.
• Every platform disagrees, so render each one. They crop differently, truncate at different lengths, and fall back differently. One generic preview hides exactly the bug you are looking for.
• Localhost is where the fixing happens. Reading tags straight off the machine, with no tunnel and no throwaway deploy, is what turns this from a post-mortem tool into a pre-flight one.
• Say what to paste. The audit names the problem and the fix, which is the difference between a linter and a colleague.

What it actually does

• Six platform previews. WhatsApp, X, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord and Instagram, drawn the way each app draws them.
• The tag audit. Truncated titles, a missing og:image, wrong dimensions, Twitter Card fallbacks: what is broken and what to paste instead.
• Localhost previews. Point it at http://localhost:3000 and it reads the tags. No ngrok.
• A checker per surface. Separate tools for WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X cards, Slack, and a bulk URL run, because those are the questions people actually arrive with.

What it refuses to do

The most useful part of any note like this. Every line has a reason attached.

• Being an SEO suite. It does one job on one artefact. The share card is not the sitemap.
• Charging for scans. Free and unlimited, which is his call and part of why it gets used.
• Asking who you are. No account for a tool you might use twice this month.

How we’ll know it worked

• A broken card gets fixed before the post goes out, not after somebody replies to say it looks wrong.
• The localhost path gets used, because that is the thing no other tool in the category does well.
• People arrive at the platform-specific checker for the surface they are actually posting to. WhatsApp is the one that surprises people most.

Where it could go wrong

• Platforms change their cards. Every rendering is a moving target. A layout change on any of the six makes a pixel-accurate mockup quietly inaccurate.
• Caches outlive the fix. Previewing correctly does not clear somebody else's cache. A link already shared can keep showing the old card for a while, which is outside any preview tool's reach.
• It is one person's project. Free, open source and maintained by its maker. We list it because we use it, and we say that plainly rather than implying a company behind it.

What’s next

• Kedar's roadmap, not ours. The public source and the tools index are the honest place to look.