Free URL Metadata API

A URL metadata API lets you send any web address and receive structured information about that page in return: its title, description, Open Graph tags, Twitter Card data, favicons, canonical URL, JSON-LD structured data, and more. Instead of writing and maintaining your own HTML parser, you delegate the heavy lifting to a dedicated service that handles redirects, JavaScript rendering, charset detection, and edge cases across millions of different websites.

Developers use URL metadata APIs to power link previews in chat applications, validate social sharing cards before publishing, audit SEO tags at scale, aggregate content from RSS feeds, and enrich bookmarking tools with rich thumbnails and descriptions. The challenge has always been finding a service that is free, reliable, and requires no authentication overhead. This guide compares the three most popular options available today and shows you exactly how to integrate each one.

Why You Need a URL Metadata API

Building a metadata extraction system from scratch means dealing with an enormous surface area of problems. You need to handle HTTP redirects (301, 302, 307, 308), detect and convert character encodings, parse malformed HTML, execute JavaScript on pages that render client-side, respect robots.txt directives, manage request timeouts, and keep up with constantly evolving Open Graph and Twitter Card specifications. A purpose-built API eliminates all of that complexity.

Here are the four most common use cases that drive adoption of URL metadata APIs:

LinkMeta vs Microlink vs open-graph-scraper

Three tools dominate the URL metadata extraction space, but they serve very different needs. LinkMeta and Microlink are hosted REST APIs that you call over HTTP. The open-graph-scraper package is a Node.js library that runs inside your own application. The table below breaks down the key differences across pricing, features, authentication, and deployment model.

LinkMeta stands out for teams that want zero-friction integration. There are no API keys to manage, no payment tiers to navigate, and no servers to provision. You send a GET request with a URL parameter and receive a comprehensive JSON response containing Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards, favicons in multiple sizes, JSON-LD structured data, and standard HTML metadata. The batch endpoint lets you extract metadata from up to 10 URLs in a single request, which is invaluable for dashboards and content management systems.

Microlink is a capable alternative with a polished developer experience, but the free tier is limited to 50 requests per day. For production workloads, you will need a paid plan starting at $15.99 per month. It excels at screenshot capture and PDF generation alongside metadata extraction, making it a broader toolkit at a higher price point.

open-graph-scraper is the right choice when you need complete control over the extraction process and are comfortable running your own infrastructure. As a Node.js library, it runs inside your application with no external API calls. The tradeoff is that you must handle HTTP requests, error recovery, rate limiting, and infrastructure scaling yourself. It also lacks JSON-LD extraction and favicon detection out of the box.

How to Use LinkMeta API

LinkMeta exposes a single extraction endpoint at GET /api/v1/extract. Pass any URL as a query parameter and receive structured metadata in JSON format. No authentication headers, no API keys, no signup process. The examples below show how to call the API from three popular environments.

curl -s "https://linkmeta.dev/api/v1/extract?url=https://github.com" | jq .

The response includes every piece of metadata the target page exposes. Here is a typical response structure:

{
  "success": true,
  "metadata": {
    "title": "GitHub: Let's build from here",
    "description": "GitHub is where over 100 million developers shape the future of software.",
    "canonical": "https://github.com/",
    "favicon": "https://github.githubassets.com/favicons/favicon.svg",
    "openGraph": {
      "og:title": "GitHub: Let's build from here",
      "og:description": "GitHub is where over 100 million developers shape the future...",
      "og:image": "https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/social-cards/github-social.png",
      "og:url": "https://github.com/",
      "og:type": "website",
      "og:site_name": "GitHub"
    },
    "twitterCard": {
      "twitter:card": "summary_large_image",
      "twitter:site": "@github",
      "twitter:title": "GitHub: Let's build from here"
    },
    "jsonLd": [ ... ],
    "favicons": [
      { "href": "https://github.githubassets.com/favicons/favicon.svg", "type": "image/svg+xml" },
      { "href": "https://github.githubassets.com/favicons/favicon.png", "sizes": "512x512" }
    ]
  }
}

For batch extraction, use the POST /api/v1/extract/batch endpoint to process up to 10 URLs in a single request:

curl -X POST "https://linkmeta.dev/api/v1/extract/batch" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "urls": [
      "https://github.com",
      "https://stackoverflow.com",
      "https://developer.mozilla.org"
    ]
  }'

What Data Can You Extract?

LinkMeta's extraction engine parses every metadata source embedded in a web page. Here is the complete list of data fields available in the API response:

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Resources

Continue learning about URL metadata extraction and link preview generation with these related guides:

• How to Extract Open Graph Tags from Any URL — deep dive into OG tag parsing and validation
• Link Preview API: Generate Rich Previews for Any URL — building link preview cards with LinkMeta
• LinkMeta API Documentation — complete endpoint reference with request/response schemas
• Interactive API Playground — test the API live in your browser with any URL