Algorithm, Search & Distribution
Open Graph
Also called: OG tags, og:image, social preview tags
Open Graph is a small set of tags in a page's head, og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url among them, read by social platforms and messaging apps to build a preview card. Get them wrong and your link shows up as a bare URL with whatever text the crawler could scrape and no image, which is a far weaker thing to have shared.
For creators the relevant surface is anything you own away from YouTube: a site, a link-in-bio page, a newsletter archive, a landing page. YouTube builds its own cards for video URLs and you cannot edit those. X reads its twitter:card tags first and falls back to Open Graph, and platforms cache previews hard, so a change often needs their own debugger to refresh.