Troubleshooting guide

Discord link preview not showing?

Discord calls a link preview an embed. When someone posts your link, Discord reads the page’s Open Graph tags and shows the site name, title, description and image in a card. Here’s what to check when the embed is missing or looks wrong.

The check opens on the Discord preview, with your theme color and the large or small image Discord would show.

What Discord needs

Tags: og:title, og:description, og:image, plus og:site_name above the title
Large image: twitter:card set to summary_large_image, otherwise a small thumbnail
Color: <meta name="theme-color"> colors the embed’s left border
Crawler: Discordbot/2.0

Discord doesn’t document its link previews. These come from developer reports and testing.

Common causes and fixes

1
The tags are missing or added by JavaScript

Discord reads the HTML your server sends. Without Open Graph tags there’s nothing to show, and tags a JavaScript framework adds later are never seen.

Fix: Check your page to see which tags the server sends, then copy the generated code into your <head>.
2
The image shows as a small thumbnail

Discord only shows the large image under the text when the page sets twitter:card to summary_large_image. Without it the image is a small square on the right.

Fix: Add <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">. It also gives you the large card on X.
3
The embed has no color

The colored bar on the left comes from your page’s theme-color meta tag. Without one, Discord uses a plain gray bar.

Fix: Add <meta name="theme-color" content="#d42a1c"> with your brand color.
4
The poster can’t embed links in that channel

Embeds need the Embed Links permission. If the poster’s role doesn’t have it in that channel, every link they post stays plain.

Fix: Nothing to fix on your page. A server admin can allow Embed Links for that role or channel.
5
Bot protection blocks Discord

Firewalls and bot protection can stop Discord’s crawler, which identifies itself as Discordbot/2.0. The image needs a public https address too.

Fix: Let Discordbot through your bot protection, and open the image address in a private window to confirm it’s public.
6
The link was posted without an embed

Wrapping a link in angle brackets, like <https://example.com>, posts it without an embed, and the poster can remove an embed from their message afterwards.

Fix: Post the link on its own, without angle brackets.

Still seeing the old preview?

Discord keeps the embed it fetched earlier for a while, and messages already posted keep their old embed. To test a fix, post the link with a query string such as ?v=2.

Send this instead

example.com/page?v=2

Next fix, next number: ?v=3

Questions

What people ask when the fixes above don’t explain it.

Why doesn’t Discord show my image at all?

Check that og:image is a full https:// address that opens in a private window. SVG images aren’t shown. A 1200×630 JPG or PNG works everywhere.

How do I turn off embeds for my own messages?

Wrap the link in angle brackets, or remove the embed from your message after posting. To stop seeing embeds everywhere, turn off link previews in Discord’s chat settings.

Does Discord use the same tags as other platforms?

Yes. The Open Graph tags that make previews work on Facebook, LinkedIn and Slack also make Discord embeds. The only Discord-specific parts are theme-color for the bar and twitter:card for the large image.