meta twitter:* card tags

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">, and the twitter:site, twitter:creator, twitter:title, twitter:description and twitter:image that follow it, were Twitter’s card markup: its own copy of the preview metadata Open Graph already carried. Generators and SEO plugins emit the whole block by default, so it sits next to an identical set of og:* tags on most of the web.

Why avoid

Remove them altogether. X no longer documents the format: the Cards markup reference on developer.x.com now redirects to the docs.x.com overview, and docs.x.com has no pages on Cards at all. Its “X for websites” section covers embedded posts, buttons and timelines. What is left is undocumented vendor markup, maintained on every page for a platform that no longer describes it.

Removing them changes how links look on X, and the rule doesn’t pretend otherwise. twitter:card picked the card type, and it has no Open Graph equivalent. X’s last published markup reference said that when og:type, og:title and og:description are present but twitter:card is absent, “a summary card may be rendered”. So a page that relied on summary_large_image gets the small summary card instead, and loses the twitter:site and twitter:creator attribution. That is the price, and it is accepted here.

The one pair with a reader outside X doesn’t change that. twitter:label1 and twitter:data1 (and a second pair) show up as extra key/value rows when Slack unfurls a link, and X itself never showed them. A reading time in a Slack preview isn’t worth keeping a vendor namespace alive. They go too.

Everything else in the block repeats Open Graph, which Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord and X’s own fallback all read. Two copies of the title, description and image drift apart, and only one of them is the one people see.

Use instead

One description of the page, in Open Graph:

<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/post">
<meta property="og:title" content="A great post">
<meta property="og:description" content="Summary of the post.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/cover.jpg">

Detectability

Fully detectable. <meta name> holds a single value, so the selector is a case-insensitive prefix match on twitter:, for both name and property, which many generators use interchangeably.

Four names are deliberately left alone: twitter:dnt, twitter:widgets:autoload, twitter:widgets:csp and twitter:widgets:theme. They aren’t card tags. X still documents them as webpage properties for its embed widgets, and twitter:dnt opts visitors out of X’s personalisation. Removing that one would quietly turn tracking back on.

Resources

• X Developer Platform — Cards markup (archived, 2024) — the last published tag reference: twitter:card sets “the card type”; without it, “a summary card may be rendered”.
• X Developer Platform — X for websites — the current section, with no Cards documentation; the old markup URL redirects to docs.x.com.
• X Developer Platform — Webpage properties — twitter:dnt and twitter:widgets:*, the names this rule excludes.
• The Open Graph protocol — the replacement every link-preview consumer reads.
• Matt Haughey (Slack) — Everything you ever wanted to know about unfurling but were afraid to ask — Slack’s explanation of how its unfurler reads twitter:label1 and twitter:data1.