set_social_meta: Agent-Applied Open Graph Changes

set_social_meta is the tool the Get AI Traffic agent uses to set a page’s Open Graph fields after you approve a fix. It sets the card other platforms show when someone shares your link, then publishes through your site’s connection.

This page documents what the tool touches, what it refuses to touch, and how to undo it. For the decision of which pages deserve a share image and what belongs in it, read Get Your Open Graph Image Size Wrong and Your Links Look Broken. That question is a judgment call. This page is about the mechanics.

What it does

When you approve a missing_og action item, the agent sets the Open Graph fields on the page: og:title, og:description, and og:image. You get whichever of the three the agent supplies; at least one is required, and a call that provides none is rejected outright.

On WordPress the tool routes to whichever plugin owns your metadata: if Yoast owns the SEO title, the values are written to Yoast’s OpenGraph keys; otherwise the Get AI Traffic plugin stores them under its own keys and emits the tags through a wp_head fallback. That routing starts from the site’s platform configuration, but the plugin gets the final say: it checks whether Yoast is actually running and uses Yoast’s OpenGraph keys when it is, whatever the stored configuration says. So the tags land where your theme renders them, even if the configuration is stale, instead of duplicating what a plugin already emits.

Each field is handled separately: read the current value, record it, write the new one. That means each field is reversible on its own. It also means a failure part way through leaves the earlier fields applied. If setting og:image fails after og:title and og:description already landed, the run stops there and those first two stay set and stay in the ledger. You are never left with a half-written single field, but you can be left with a partly-updated card.

What it will not touch

• The visible page. This tool writes head metadata only. Nothing changes on the rendered page.
• Fields you did not supply. Omit og:image and the existing image is left exactly as it was. The tool sets only what it is given, so it will not blank out a field by leaving it out.
• Twitter Card tags. This tool sets Open Graph properties. X falls back to Open Graph when its own tags are missing, but the twitter: tags are not what this tool writes.
• The image itself.og:image takes a URL. The tool points at an image, it does not create, resize, or upload one.

Timing

The tags are written to your site immediately, but most platforms cache the preview card they scraped the first time your link was shared. A corrected card usually shows up on newly shared links right away and on already-shared links only after that platform re-scrapes, which you do not control.

Rolling back

Every applied field is written to the ledger with its prior value. roll_back restores the previous values exactly. Because the fields are recorded one by one, they roll back one by one.

Related tools

• purge_cache runs after an apply, so a cached copy of the old page does not keep serving the old tags at the edge.
• set_featured_image sets the WordPress post thumbnail, which is a separate mechanism with its own ledger entries. The two are easy to confuse: og:image is the picture other platforms show when the link is shared, while the featured image is the thumbnail your theme renders in listings. Setting one does not set the other.
• set_meta_description sets the search-snippet description, a different field from og:description. Setting one does not set the other.

Findings this tool resolves

• missing_og: a page has no Open Graph tags, so platforms and crawlers guess at the title, description, and preview image.