Twitter Cards are a set of meta tags that tell X (formerly Twitter) how to display a link preview. The twitter:card tag sets the layout, most commonly summary or summary_large_image. For title, description and image, X falls back to Open Graph tags if no twitter: equivalents exist, so most sites need only a twitter:card tag plus their existing OG tags. The tag names still use the "twitter" prefix after the rebrand.
Card types
- summary: small square thumbnail beside the title and description
- summary_large_image: large image above the title, the common choice for articles and product pages
- app: promotes a mobile app download
- player: embeds video or audio
A minimal setup
With Open Graph tags already in place, add the card type and, optionally, your account handle.
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@yourbrand" />
<!-- title, description and image fall back to og: tags -->Relevance to SEO
Like Open Graph, card tags do not affect search rankings. They affect how links look and perform when shared on X. X's display of link previews has changed several times since the rebrand, including how much of the title is shown, and its developer documentation is the place to check current behavior.
Testing previews
X retired its standalone card validator's preview function some time ago, so the practical test is to compose a post containing the link and look at the preview before publishing, or to use a third-party preview tool. Make sure the image URL is absolute, publicly reachable and not blocked by robots.txt, since X fetches it with its own crawler. If you changed tags recently, previews may reflect a cached version for a while.
Example
Fixing small previews
Hypothetical analytics tool Graphwick noticed its blog links showed as small thumbnails on X while competitors had large images. Its pages had Open Graph tags but no twitter:card tag, so X defaulted to the summary layout. Adding summary_large_image to the article template fixed it.
Common mistakes
Duplicating every OG tag
Adding twitter:title, twitter:description and twitter:image identical to the OG values is harmless but unnecessary; fallback covers it.
Questions
The meta tag names still use the twitter: prefix. Check X's developer documentation for any changes.
