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Read the title and meta description of a page with curl

harmlessSEO checksdebian, ubuntu
Adjust the values, the command updates live
user@server
curl -s https://example.com/ | tr '\n' ' ' | grep -oiE '<title[^>]*>[^<]*</title>|<meta[^>]*name=.?description[^>]*>'

Shows the <title> and the <meta name="description"> of the page. This quickly checks whether an SEO plugin actually outputs the values, whether they appear twice, or whether the page title is missing after an update. Multiple matches per type are an error.

Note: HTML entities such as &amp; appear unchanged. curl does not see content that is only set via JavaScript.

Also searched as

  • get page title command line
  • check meta description curl
  • what is the title tag of this page
  • check search snippet texts

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