Research · Auto repair
The missing link preview
When a happy customer texts your website to a friend, the phone tries to build a small card with a picture, your name and a line of description. Nearly a third of the homepages we checked give it nothing to build from.
Nearly a third had none of the tags that build a link preview.
This is the one part of your website that shows up somewhere you do not control: a text message, a Facebook post, a WhatsApp group, a Slack channel at the local business park. It is also the moment when somebody is actively recommending you.
A bare link is a weaker recommendation
Where the tags are missing, most sites still have a page title to fall back on, so the link arrives as a line of small grey text and a web address. It works, but it looks like something nobody bothered with.
For 350 homepages there was no title either. Those links arrive as nothing but the address itself, next to a blank grey square.
How we got these numbers
We checked the homepages of websites belonging to businesses categorized as auto repair, using the latest result for each site and counting every website once.
Of 6,606 websites, 6,382 homepages could be checked for these tags. We recorded whether Open Graph tags were present, and separately whether the page had a title to fall back on.
An honest limitation: these are the businesses we chose to analyze, not a random sample of the industry. Platforms differ in how they build a preview, and having the tags does not prove the picture and wording they point at are any good. This measures whether anything was prepared at all.
What to do about it
- Test it first. Send your homepage link to yourself in a message and look at what appears.
- Pick one good picture. The front of the shop or your team beats a stock photo of an engine.
- Write the two lines. A title with your business name and town, and one sentence saying what you do.
- Ask whoever built the site. On most website platforms this is a settings screen, not a rebuild.