LinkedIn Post Inspector: How to Check and Refresh Your Link Preview

You just shared a link on LinkedIn and the preview card came out wrong. Maybe there's no image at all, maybe it's pulling a logo from three redesigns ago, maybe the headline doesn't match the page anymore. The fix almost everyone eventually finds is the LinkedIn Post Inspector, a free tool at linkedin.com/post-inspector that shows you exactly what LinkedIn's crawler sees when it reads a URL, and forces it to look again. Here's what it actually does, what it can't do, and the one limitation that trips up most people the first time they use it.

Walking Through the LinkedIn Post Inspector, Step by Step

Before touching the tool, it helps to know which layer you're even dealing with. A LinkedIn link preview comes from three separate places, and a problem in one looks identical to a problem in another until you actually check.

The first layer is your page's own HTML: the Open Graph tags (og:title, og:image, og:description, og:url) sitting in the <head>. The second layer is LinkedIn's crawler cache, which stores a copy of those tags the first time anyone shares the URL and doesn't automatically re-check them afterward.

The third layer is the individual post itself. Once it's published, LinkedIn locks in whatever preview it built at that moment. Change your tags after that, and the old post keeps showing the old card regardless.

Most confusion about a broken LinkedIn link preview comes from mixing those three up. Fix your tags but the crawler cache is still stale? Preview stays wrong. Refresh the crawler cache but the post already went out? Preview stays wrong too, for a completely different reason.

The Post Inspector only owns that second layer. Worth remembering as you read the rest of this.

What the LinkedIn Post Inspector actually is

LinkedIn's own help page describes it plainly: when you post, message, or write an article with a URL, "the preview window may show an old image that is cached," and the Post Inspector exists to force a fresh look. You paste a URL, it re-crawls the page, reads the current Open Graph tags, and shows you the preview LinkedIn would build right now. That's the whole job. It's not a scheduling tool and not an analytics dashboard, just a crawler with a refresh button attached.

If you've used Facebook's Sharing Debugger or X's now-retired Card Validator, this will feel familiar. Same idea, LinkedIn's own version, tuned to how LinkedIn's crawler resolves tags.

How to run it

The process takes under a minute once you know where to look.

• Go to linkedin.com/post-inspector while signed in to LinkedIn.
• Paste the full URL, including the https:// prefix. A bare domain without the scheme will usually fail.
• Click Inspect.
• Read the preview card it generates, plus any flagged issues underneath (missing tags, connection errors, that kind of thing).

One detail catches a lot of people out: the Inspector re-fetches your page's raw HTML, and if your site itself is still serving a cached version of that HTML (a WordPress caching plugin, a CDN edge cache, a reverse proxy holding an old build), the Inspector will dutifully report the old tags right back to you, because that's genuinely what it received. Purge your own site's cache first, then run the Inspector. Skipping that step is the most common reason people insist "I updated the tags and it's still showing the old ones" when the tags on the live page really did change.

Before you even open LinkedIn's tool, it's worth running the URL through socialpreview.tools's own checker first. It resolves your og tags the way a crawler would and grades the image against the size and format rules several platforms expect, so you can see whether the problem lives in your markup before you go chasing a cache issue that isn't there. If you want to see exactly how that grading works, the about page walks through it in plain language.

What og:image size does LinkedIn use

This is where a lot of secondary sources get sloppy, rounding LinkedIn's numbers into something vaguer than what LinkedIn actually publishes. Here's the spec straight from LinkedIn's own help page for making a site shareable.

Notice that word: minimum. LinkedIn states 1200x627 as a floor, not a target. A lot of roundup articles phrase it as a "recommended size," which quietly changes the mental model. If 1200x627 is the minimum, then going bigger is the safer default, not just a nicety, because LinkedIn (and every other platform your link might land on) can scale a larger source image down cleanly, but can't scale a smaller one up without it looking soft.

LinkedIn's help page also lists four required tags for a shareable card: og:title, og:image, og:description, and og:url. That last one is the tag people forget most often, and a missing og:url is a genuinely common, easy-to-miss reason a card looks half built even when the image and title are fine.

<meta property="og:title" content="Your Page Title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="One or two sentences about the page." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/preview.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/your-page" />

Those numbers are LinkedIn's specifically. Other platforms use slightly different minimums and ratios for the same og:image tag, and socialpreview.tools' OG image size guide lays out how each one compares, useful if the same link is also landing on Facebook or Slack.

If you're building these tags from nothing rather than debugging existing ones, socialpreview.tools' tag generator writes them for you and shows a live preview across platforms as you fill in each field, which is faster than hand-editing a template and guessing at the LinkedIn og:image size until it looks right.

Worth a separate mention if your image itself is the problem: wrong format, too heavy, dimensions off. That's a question about the image file, not the markup around it, and a dedicated file-level checker like imagecheck.tools can confirm the actual pixel dimensions and weight of what you're serving before you assume the tag is lying to you.

How do I refresh a LinkedIn link preview

The Post Inspector is the refresh mechanism. There isn't a separate "clear cache" button hiding somewhere else, running an inspection is the LinkedIn cache refresh. Paste the URL, click Inspect, and LinkedIn re-crawls the page and rebuilds its cached copy of the tags from what it finds right now.

Two conditions have to both be true for that refresh to actually show a corrected preview:

• Your site is serving the current, correct tags at that URL, not a stale cached HTML snapshot.
• You're sharing the link fresh, or in a post that hasn't been published yet.

Miss either one and the refresh looks like it "didn't work," even though it did exactly what it's designed to do.

Why does LinkedIn show an old image

There are really only two causes, and separating them saves a lot of wasted troubleshooting time.

Cause one: the crawler cache hasn't been told to look again. This is the fixable one. Run the Post Inspector, confirm the tags it reads back match what you intended, and any new share of that URL should use the corrected preview.

Cause two: the post is already published. This is the one almost every competing article glosses over or states backwards. LinkedIn's own help page (cited above) says it in plain language: "The changes you make will only affect the URL's preview image and information for new posts that include it. The preview for any existing posts with this URL will remain the same."

Read that twice if you need to. A refresh does not reach into a post that's already live and swap its image. It can't. The only real fix for an existing post with a wrong preview is deleting it and re-sharing the link, which generates a new post with a freshly crawled preview.

People consistently treat "the Inspector shows the new preview" and "my actual post shows the new preview" as the same event. They're not. One is a preview of what a future share would look like. The other is a snapshot frozen at publish time.

As for how long LinkedIn holds onto a cached preview before you'd need to refresh it manually, you'll see "about a week" repeated across enough blogs and help forums that it reads like settled fact. It isn't, at least not on either of LinkedIn's own help pages. Treat it as a commonly reported practitioner estimate, not a number LinkedIn has published, and just run the Inspector directly rather than counting days.

When it's not actually a cache problem

Sometimes a LinkedIn preview not showing at all, a blank card with no image, no title, nothing, isn't a caching issue in the first place. It's a live error. LinkedIn's help documentation for Page posts separately flags a "cannot display preview" message tied to SSL certificate problems on the linked page, worth a check if your site recently changed hosts or certificates. A few other errors show up often enough in practitioner reports to mention here, even though LinkedIn hasn't published an official reference list for their exact wording:

• Connection or fetch errors usually mean the crawler couldn't reach the page at all. Check that the URL loads without a login wall or a robots block.
• Canonical URL mismatches happen when your page's canonical tag points somewhere different from the URL you're inspecting. LinkedIn may build the preview for the canonical target instead.
• Rate limit or "too many requests" errors show up if you inspect the same URL repeatedly in a short window. Waiting fifteen to thirty minutes before retrying is the commonly reported fix, though that figure comes from practitioner reports rather than an official LinkedIn number.

One real-world pattern worth knowing before you blame your own tags: a support thread in Adobe's community forum documented users whose links, posted through a third-party scheduling tool, showed no image preview on LinkedIn at all, even though the same image loaded fine everywhere else and posting the identical link manually through LinkedIn worked without issue. Adobe's own community team acknowledged it as a platform-side issue on LinkedIn's end, later marked resolved. The lesson isn't "distrust every tool you use to post." It's that the Post Inspector is how you tell the difference between your markup being wrong and LinkedIn having a temporary hiccup on its side. If the Inspector shows a clean, correct preview and your actual post still doesn't, the problem isn't yours to fix by editing tags again.

If you post the same link to other networks too, it's worth knowing LinkedIn's crawler isn't the only bot reading your tags. According to OpenGraph+'s LinkedIn guide, LinkedIn's crawler identifies itself in server logs as LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Apache-HttpClient +http://www.linkedin.com), useful if you're troubleshooting a firewall or bot-blocking rule rather than an Open Graph problem, since a blocked crawler and a bad tag produce the same blank result from the outside.

The broader habit worth building: run the Inspector before you share a link, not only after a preview already looks broken. It costs a few seconds, and it catches a wrong image or missing tag before it's frozen into a published post. For the platform-agnostic version of this troubleshooting, socialpreview.tools' link preview troubleshooting guide covers the same three-layer thinking across Facebook, X, Discord, Slack and the rest, in case LinkedIn isn't the only place your link is landing wrong.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the LinkedIn Post Inspector?

The LinkedIn Post Inspector is LinkedIn's own free tool, available at linkedin.com/post-inspector, that shows you the preview card LinkedIn will build from a URL's Open Graph tags and forces its crawler to re-fetch the page rather than relying on a cached copy. LinkedIn's help documentation describes its job as fixing cases where "the preview window may show an old image that is cached." It only affects LinkedIn's own crawler cache, not your site's tags and not any post that's already been published.

How do I refresh a LinkedIn link preview?

Go to linkedin.com/post-inspector, paste the full URL including the https:// prefix, and click Inspect. LinkedIn re-crawls the page and rebuilds its cached preview from the current tags it finds there. If your own site is still serving stale cached HTML at that URL, purge your site's cache first, otherwise the Inspector will just re-confirm the same outdated tags. The refresh applies to future shares of the link, not to a post that's already gone out.

What og:image size does LinkedIn use?

LinkedIn's help page states a minimum image size of 1200 by 627 pixels, a recommended aspect ratio of 1.91:1, and a maximum file size of 5 MB. Because 1200x627 is stated as a minimum rather than a target, using a larger source image is the safer default, since LinkedIn can scale a bigger image down cleanly but can't improve a smaller one. LinkedIn also requires four tags for a shareable card: og:title, og:image, og:description, and og:url.

Why does LinkedIn show an old image?

Two separate causes produce this, and they need different fixes. If LinkedIn's crawler cache simply hasn't been told to re-check the page, running the Post Inspector solves it. If the post is already published, LinkedIn's own help page states directly that a refresh "will only affect the URL's preview image and information for new posts," and the preview on any existing post "will remain the same" no matter how many times you re-inspect the URL. In that second case, the only fix is deleting the post and re-sharing the link so LinkedIn builds a new preview from scratch.