og:image not showing? Five causes, and two of them are not in any guide
The size answer is 1200×630 and every guide already says it. These are the failures that happen when the size is already right and the tag still does not appear.
Two of my posts were blank for a month. Every log said the publish succeeded.
The bug was one missing method call. I fixed it and moved on, which meant the pages that had already shipped stayed broken for five more weeks until I found them by accident.
I ran 40 SERP checks looking for an opening in English. I found zero.
A negative result, with the method and the counts. Every seat was already taken, and the thing taking it was almost always whoever sells the product the query is about.
18 pages beat 320 pages by 16x. Rank and CTR were identical.
I spent three weeks assuming a cluster on my site was winning because it ranked better or converted better. When I finally measured it properly, position and click-through were a dead heat and the entire gap was something else.
My site had zero Google Discover impressions for 90 days. The cause was two tags.
Not a penalty, not a content problem. Google measured the site and reported exactly zero, and the reason was two technical requirements the platform was quietly failing.
A reader called my AI-written post garbage. They were right.
My quality checker gave the post a perfect score. It was wrong about seven separate facts. Here is what I learned about why scoring content does not catch content that is false.