# Link Preview API - Open Graph, Twitter Card & oEmbed Metadata (`neverempty/link-preview-api`) Actor
For chat apps, CMS editors and AI agents that unfurl links: send URLs, get title, description, image, site name, favicon, canonical URL and language from Open Graph, Twitter Card, oEmbed and the HTML head. About a second per URL. Respects robots.txt; URLs that cannot be previewed are free.
- **URL**: https://apify.com/neverempty/link-preview-api.md
- **Developed by:** [NeverEmpty](https://apify.com/neverempty) (community)
- **Categories:** Developer tools, Automation, SEO tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet
## Pricing
from $2.40 / 1,000 preview returneds
This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.
Since this Actor supports Apify Store discounts, the price gets lower the higher subscription plan you have.
Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event
## What's an Apify Actor?
An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.
Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.
## How to integrate an Actor?
If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.
Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.
For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.
Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).
# README
## Link Preview API - Open Graph, Twitter Card & oEmbed Metadata
Give it a URL, get back the link preview: **title, description, image, site name, favicon, canonical URL, language and type** in one clean JSON row, read from the page's **Open Graph** tags, **Twitter Card** tags, **oEmbed** endpoint and HTML ``.
Built for software that unfurls links: chat apps and bots (Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams), CMS and newsletter editors, bookmarking and read-later apps, CRMs, AI agents and RAG pipelines that need a title and thumbnail for a URL, and SEO tools that check `og:image` and `twitter:card` tags.
- **One URL in about a second.** Only the `` of each page is read; the download stops at ``, so a 1.3 MB YouTube page costs the same memory as a small blog post. A run with one URL finished in 2.5 to 3.2 seconds on Apify, including start-up (2026-09-24).
- **Only real values.** A page with no `og:image` has `image: null`. The favicon comes from the page's own ``; `/favicon.ico` is not guessed. Nothing is filled in with made-up defaults.
- **Nothing is charged for a URL that could not be previewed.** A page that does not exist, refuses automated reading, needs a sign-in or has no title, description or image comes back as a free row that says why.
- **Respects each site's robots.txt** (RFC 9309) for every URL, every redirect and every oEmbed endpoint, and never signs in, solves check pages or rotates proxies to get around a refusal.
- **Any character set.** The `charset` is taken from the response header, a byte-order mark or the `` in the page itself, and the page is decoded with that character set instead of being forced into UTF-8 (tested on kakaku.com, which declares Shift\_JIS only in ``).
- **Monitor mode** returns only URLs whose preview changed since the last run, with the previous title, description and image. Each change is confirmed by a second read, so a rotating image is not reported as a change.
### Input
| Field | Type | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| `urls` | array of strings | (empty: the example `https://github.com/apify/crawlee` is used) | Page URLs, 1 to 1,000 per run. A URL without `http://` or `https://` is read as `https://`. The same URL given twice (also when only the `#fragment` differs) is read and charged once. |
| `acceptLanguage` | string | (not sent) | Optional `Accept-Language` header, for sites that show a different language version by language, for example `en`, `ja-JP` or `de-DE,de;q=0.9`. Empty means the version the site shows by default. |
| `includeOembed` | boolean | `true` | When the page links to its own oEmbed JSON endpoint in its `` (on 2026-09-24: YouTube and Spotify among the 23 pages read), also read it and add the `oembed` object. |
| `onlyChanges` | boolean | `false` | Monitor mode: return only URLs whose title, description, image, site name, canonical URL or type changed since the last run with the same `watchName`, plus URLs new to the watch. |
| `watchName` | string | (none) | Name of the remembered state (letters, digits, `.`, `-`, `_`; up to 40). Setting it fills `changeType` and the previous-value columns. With monitor mode on and no name, `default` is used. |
| `resetMonitoringState` | boolean | `false` | Forget what this watch remembered, so every URL is returned as a first check. |
| `maxConcurrency` | integer | `4` | URLs read in parallel, 1 to 8. |
| `requestTimeoutSecs` | integer | `20` | Time limit for one request, 5 to 60 seconds. HTTP 429, 500, 502, 503 and 504 are asked again up to two more times; a site that does not answer in time is asked once more. |
```json
{
"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "github.com/apify/crawlee"]
}
```
### Output
One row per URL. A real row from 2026-09-24 (long text shortened here):
```json
{
"status": "ok",
"position": 1,
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"finalUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"httpStatus": 200,
"contentType": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
"redirects": [],
"title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
"description": "The official video for βNever Gonna Give You Upβ by Rick Astley. ...",
"image": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
"imageWidth": 1280,
"imageHeight": 720,
"imageAlt": null,
"siteName": "YouTube",
"favicon": "https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/02b72088/img/favicon_32x32.png",
"appleTouchIcon": null,
"canonicalUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"ogUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"language": "en",
"languageSource": "html",
"type": "video.other",
"twitterCard": "summary_large_image",
"twitterSite": "@youtube",
"author": "Rick Astley",
"publishedTime": null,
"modifiedTime": null,
"themeColor": "rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.98)",
"video": "https://www.youtube.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"oembed": {
"type": "video",
"title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
"authorName": "Rick Astley",
"authorUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
"providerName": "YouTube",
"providerUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/",
"thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/hqdefault.jpg",
"thumbnailWidth": 480,
"thumbnailHeight": 360,
"html": "