Twitter Cards — officially X Cards since the rebrand, though the tags are still named twitter: — turn a bare link into a card with a title, a description and an image. They are four meta tags in the head, plus one quirk that saves half the work: X falls back to your Open Graph tags when its own are missing.
The tags, and which one is mandatory
| Tag | What it does | Mandatory? |
|---|---|---|
| twitter:card | Sets the card layout. Without it there is no card. | Yes |
| twitter:title | The card headline. | No — falls back to og:title |
| twitter:description | The supporting text under the headline. | No — falls back to og:description |
| twitter:image | The image. Absolute URL, never relative. | No — falls back to og:image |
| twitter:site | Attributes the card to your @handle. | No |
The only strictly required one is twitter:card. If your Open Graph is already in place, adding just that tag gives you a correct card without duplicating title, description and image.
The four card types
| Type | How it looks | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| summary | Small square image to the left of the text. | Content where the image supports but does not sell: documentation, notes. |
| summary_large_image | Large image on top, text below. Takes far more space. | The usual choice: articles, product pages, anything with a decent image. |
| app | App listing with a link to the store. | Mobile apps only. |
| player | Embedded video or audio player. | Requires prior approval from X. |
In practice the decision is between the first two, and summary_large_image wins nearly every time: the card occupies considerably more of the timeline, and that shows in the clicks.
The image: what fails most
- •Absolute URL, with https and the full domain. X’s crawler will not resolve a relative path.
- •The image has to be reachable without cookies or a login. Behind a CDN with a signed, expiring URL, the card ends up with no image.
- •For summary_large_image the ratio is landscape; for summary, square. A portrait image gets centre-cropped and loses whatever mattered.
- •If you change the image, X serves the cached version for a while. Changing the file URL forces a refresh.
When X ignores your tags
There are three common reasons a page with correct tags still shows up as a bare link:
- 1.The page blocks X’s crawler in robots.txt. It is the most frequent case and the most invisible, because the HTML is perfect and nobody gets to read it.
- 2.The tags are injected with JavaScript. The crawler reads the served HTML, not the rendered page.
- 3.twitter:card is missing and there is no Open Graph either. With neither, there is nothing to build a card from.
Check it before you publish
The card renders once and there is no second chance: publish the link with the wrong image and the post is already out. Analyse the URL first and confirm all four tags are present, the image is absolute, and the card type is the one you want.
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The tags X falls back to, and the rest of your meta tags: