How to check the meta tags on a web page

Meta tags live in a page's <head> and don't show up on screen. You need to look at the HTML to check them. Here are three ways to do that, followed by what to look for once you can see them.

Method 1: View Source

This is the fastest way, and it works in any desktop browser.

1. Open the page.

2. Press Ctrl+U (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Option+U (Mac), or type view-source: in front of the URL.

3. Press Ctrl+F and search for <title, name="description", rel="canonical", name="viewport" and og:.

Limitation: View Source shows the HTML the server sent. If the site adds or changes tags with JavaScript, common on single-page apps, you won't see those changes here.

Method 2: Browser DevTools

This shows the page as it is now, after JavaScript has run.

1. Right-click the page and choose Inspect (or press F12).

2. In the Elements panel, expand <head>.

3. Press Ctrl+F inside the panel and search for the same strings as above.

You can also run this in the Console to list every meta tag at once:

`js

document.title;

[...document.querySelectorAll('meta')].map(m =>

${m.name || m.getAttribute('property') || m.httpEquiv}: ${m.content});

document.querySelector('link[rel="canonical"]')?.href;

If Method 1 and Method 2 show different values, the tags are being set by JavaScript. Search engines may or may not see the JavaScript version straight away, so flag it.

Method 3: The command line

This is useful for checking many URLs, or for seeing exactly what a non-browser client gets:

`bash

curl -sL https://example.com/page | grep -iE '<title|<meta|rel="canonical"'

-L follows redirects. Add -A "Mozilla/5.0" if the site serves different HTML to unknown user agents. On Windows PowerShell:

`powershell

(Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/page).Content -split "`n" |

Select-String -Pattern '<title|<meta|rel="canonical"'

What to look for

Title

`html

<title>Emergency Plumber in Leeds | Smith & Co</title>

There should be exactly one. It should be specific to this page, with the subject first. Google may rewrite titles in results, but a clear title makes that less likely.

Meta description

`html

It should be present, unique and written as a plain summary. Google can use it as the snippet under the result, though it sometimes picks other page text instead.

Canonical

`html

It should be a full absolute URL pointing to the preferred version of this page, usually itself. Watch for canonicals that point to the homepage, to http://, or to a staging domain, and for pages with two canonical tags.

Viewport

`html

Without it, phones show the desktop layout shrunk down. Treat a missing viewport tag as a serious finding.

Robots

`html

This isn't always present, and that's fine. But if you find noindex on a page that's meant to rank, that's the most urgent thing on the list. It's a common leftover after a site launch.

Open Graph

`html

These control the preview card when the link is shared. The Open Graph protocol defines title, type, image and url as the basic properties. Note that they use property=, not name=, which catches people out when searching. og:image should be an absolute URL.

Common pitfalls

Checking a cached or logged-in version. Use a private window, or curl, to see what the public gets.
Searching for name="og:title". Open Graph uses property, so search for og: instead.
Treating keywords meta as important. <meta name="keywords"> is ignored by Google. Its presence or absence isn't worth reporting.
Assuming the CMS plugin got it right. SEO plugins and themes sometimes both write a title or canonical, leaving two. Always count them.

Checking tags and getting a fix list

The methods above show you the tags, but deciding what's wrong and how much it matters is still up to you. We make Auditfold, which takes a page's pasted HTML, checks the title, meta description, headings, alt text, links, canonical, viewport and Open Graph tags, and returns a fix list ranked by importance in plain words. It's one way to skip the manual pass. The browser methods above are free and always available.