How to Generate Link Previews in Your App

Link previews are everywhere: social feeds, chat apps, and CMS platforms. They instantly enrich shared links with titles, images, and descriptions. But building this yourself is harder than it seems.

Why Not Just Fetch the Page?

You could simply fetch the HTML and parse Open Graph tags. But you’ll quickly run into challenges:

Websites structure metadata differently
Some pages block crawlers or require a user-agent
Timeouts and redirects can break your logic
Fetching and parsing HTML can be slow

Using URLPreview API

Instead of reinventing the wheel, you can rely on a simple API call:

GET https://api.urlpreview.com/v1/preview?url=https://example.com&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY

The API returns clean JSON:

{
        "title": "Example Domain",
        "description": "This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents.",
        "image": "https://example.com/og-image.jpg",
        "url": "https://example.com"
      }

Displaying Previews

You can render this data into any UI component—cards, embeds, or chat bubbles. Example:

Title: response.title
Description: response.description
Image: response.image

Try It Yourself

Start generating link previews →