Why Different Platforms Need Different Meta Tags
A single URL shared across Google search, Facebook, and Twitter/X can display completely differently on each platform, because each reads a different set of meta tags to build its preview. Standard <title> and <meta name="description"> tags control how Google's own search snippet appears; OpenGraph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) control how Facebook and most other platforms render a link preview card; Twitter Card tags (twitter:card, twitter:title) control Twitter/X's specific preview format, which can differ from OpenGraph even when both are present.
Without OpenGraph tags specifically, a shared link often falls back to scraping whatever text and image the platform's crawler can find on the page — usually producing an awkward, unintended preview rather than the clean title/description/image combination a deliberately-set OpenGraph tag would produce. This is exactly why a page can look perfectly fine in search results but produce a broken or ugly-looking preview card when shared on social media — they're controlled by entirely separate sets of tags, not one shared title/description pair.
Previewing all three surfaces (search snippet, OpenGraph card, Twitter card) together before publishing catches mismatches that are otherwise easy to miss until someone actually shares the link and sees a bad result.