Social post inspector
Paste a YouTube or TikTok URL to pull its public title, creator, thumbnail and embed code straight from the official oEmbed endpoints.
How do you get a post’s metadata without an API key?
Through oEmbed — an open standard that YouTube and TikTok both serve publicly. Give it a post URL and it returns the title, creator, thumbnail and a ready-made embed snippet, with no credentials involved.
It is also the quickest way to confirm a post is genuinely public. If oEmbed cannot read it, the link preview on whatever you share it to will not render either.
The link preview is part of the post
When you share a video URL anywhere — a newsletter, Slack, another social network — the receiving platform makes exactly this request. The title, creator and thumbnail it gets back are what your audience sees before they decide whether to click.
Checking it first catches the failures that are otherwise invisible until after you have posted: a missing thumbnail because the video is still processing, a title that got truncated badly, or a video that is region-locked and will render as a dead link for half your audience.
What oEmbed will not give you
oEmbed is a presentation standard, not an analytics one. It returns what is needed to display a post and nothing more — no view counts, no likes, no comments, no publish date.
Anyone offering those numbers for YouTube or TikTok is either using an authenticated API with a key, or scraping. We would rather ship a tool that does one thing reliably and for free than one that breaks the first time a platform changes its markup.
Common questions
What is oEmbed?
oEmbed is an open standard that lets a site ask a platform for a clean, embeddable representation of a URL. YouTube and TikTok both run public oEmbed endpoints that return a post's title, creator, thumbnail and embed code with no API key and no authentication.
What can I use this for?
Checking how a link will unfurl before you share it, grabbing a thumbnail URL for a newsletter or blog post, pulling a clean embed snippet without opening developer tools, and confirming a video is actually public — if oEmbed cannot see it, neither can anyone you share it with.
Why only YouTube and TikTok?
Those are the two major platforms still running open oEmbed endpoints that work without credentials. Instagram and Facebook moved theirs behind an app token, and X removed public oEmbed access. We only list what genuinely works rather than fields that fail when you try them.
Does this show view counts or engagement?
No. oEmbed returns presentation metadata only — title, author, thumbnail and embed markup. View and like counts are not part of the standard and neither platform exposes them without an authenticated API.
Is any data stored?
No. The request goes through our server so it can be cached briefly and so the provider host can be validated, and nothing is written down. Every field shown is already public on the platform.
Why did my URL fail?
Most often the post is private, age-restricted, region-blocked or deleted — oEmbed only returns public content. Shortened links can also fail if the shortener does not resolve to a recognised host. Try the full canonical URL from the address bar.
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