The developer resource
for oEmbed

oEmbed is an open protocol that lets a website turn a plain URL into a rich embed — a playable video, an image, a tweet, or a link preview — by calling a single standardized API. Instead of writing custom code for every service, a consumer (like WordPress or Slack) requests embed data from a provider (like YouTube or Spotify) and gets back JSON describing how to display the content. It was introduced in 2008 and is supported by 369+ providers.

An oEmbed consumer sends an HTTP GET request to a provider's oEmbed endpoint, passing the content URL as a query parameter (e.g. /oembed?url=...). The provider responds with a JSON (or XML) object containing the content type, a title, a thumbnail, and — for video and rich content — an HTML snippet the consumer can embed directly. The consumer renders the response based on its 'type' field.

oEmbed defines four response types: 'photo' (a static image with url, width, and height), 'video' (a playable video with an HTML embed snippet), 'rich' (generic rich HTML content such as a tweet or map), and 'link' (metadata only, used to render a link preview card). The 'type' and 'version' fields are required on every response; version must always be '1.0'.

Open Graph (og: meta tags) describes a page for link previews — a title, description, and image — and is read by scraping the page's HTML. oEmbed is an API that returns ready-to-use embed HTML, so a consumer can render an interactive player or widget, not just a static preview. Many platforms use both: Open Graph for simple previews and oEmbed for rich, embeddable content.

There are two ways. First, check the provider registry — a catalog of known providers, their endpoint URLs, and the URL patterns they support; you can search 369+ providers in the oembed.org directory. Second, use link-tag discovery: fetch the content page and look for a <link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed"> tag pointing to the endpoint. oembed.org provides tools to test both methods.

To become a provider, create an endpoint (e.g. /oembed) that accepts a 'url' query parameter, validates that the URL maps to your content, and returns a JSON response with the required fields for your content type. Add a <link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed"> discovery tag to your pages, then register your provider in the official oEmbed registry. You can validate your endpoint against the spec with the oembed.org endpoint validator.