Feed Medic checks a feed the way the social platforms do, then reports back on what it found. Use it when a feed isn’t posting, when posts look wrong once they land, or when you want to confirm a feed is healthy before you rely on it. A run takes a few seconds and changes nothing: Medic only reads — nothing is published and no settings change — so you can run it as often as you like.
What Medic checks
Medic runs four groups of checks, in this order. The order matters — and so does the order you fix things in (see Fix from the top down below):
Reading the feed — can we fetch and parse this feed at all?
Link previews — when these links are shared, will the preview card look right?
Posting to your accounts — are posts reaching every connected destination?
Feed settings — is anything in this automation’s own settings preventing posts?
Running Medic
Open Automate.
Click the arrow beside the automation you want to check to expand it.
In the row of actions that appears — Settings, Refresh, Preview, History, Medic, Delete — click Medic.
On the Feed Medic page, click Run Medic. If the feed has never been checked, you’ll see a short explainer and the button in the center; once it has a history, Run Medic sits at the top right instead.
Watch it run. The button reads “Medic Running…” and a progress bar shows which group is being checked; the four sections appear straight away marked “Pending” and fill in as results arrive.
You can also reach Feed Medic straight from a feed you’re already viewing: click Medic in the tab bar at the top right, beside Settings and Feed History. Whichever route you use, the feed URL shows beneath the title.
The verdict banner
The banner at the top gives you the overall verdict, the counts (for example, “2 issues · 15 passed · 9 skipped”), and when the run happened. Read the verdict line first — it tells you whether this is urgent or cosmetic.
A run that only found warnings — the feed is still posting:
A run that found issues that can stop posting:
Issues — “Found problems that can stop this feed posting.” Something needs fixing: posts may not go out, or will go out broken.
Warnings — “Worth a look, but nothing here stops this feed posting.” The feed is posting; these affect how posts look, not whether they publish.
What each result icon means
Individual findings carry one of five statuses. The last one, Skipped, is the one people misread — see the next section:
Green check — Passed. We checked this and it’s fine.
Red cross — Issue. A real problem. Fix this.
Amber triangle — Warning. Works, but not well. Worth fixing when you can.
Blue info — Note. Context about the run itself, not a problem with your feed.
Grey minus — Skipped. We couldn’t check this, because something earlier blocked us.
Fix from the top down
Skipped is not the same as broken. When a check fails, everything that depended on it gets skipped rather than tested. If we can’t load your item pages, we can’t look for the tags on those pages — so every tag check turns into a “Could not check for…” row.
The result is that two real problems can produce a long list of grey rows. Those rows are not nine extra things to fix — they’re the same problem, reported nine more times.
When a run is partial, Medic says so directly with a blue note — for example, that only some items could be read, and that everything below describes that sample rather than the whole feed.
Work from the top
Find the topmost red issue, fix that, and run Medic again. Most of the list underneath usually clears on its own. Working bottom-up means chasing findings that were never independently broken.
The four sections in the report
Each section shows its own status, a count, and a plain-language summary. Sections with something to report list each finding as a heading plus an explanation of what we saw and what to do about it.
Findings tell you where the problem lives, which decides who can fix it. A finding saying none of the pages checked include a given tag points at the site template, not one bad item — that’s a job for whoever maintains the site. A finding saying pages could not be loaded at all points at the links or the server.
Every section also has a row you can expand to see what we tested and cleared — labelled “N checks passed”, or “N checks passed · N skipped” when part of the run was blocked. Some sections have their own detail expanders:
Reading the feed → Feed response — the raw response we got back from the feed.
Link previews → Sampled items — the specific items we pulled and checked.
Posting to your accounts → Posting by destination — results per connected account, so you can tell whether a problem is one destination or all of them.
Sampled items
This is the most useful expander when previews are wrong. It tells you how much of the feed was sampled, then shows each item we checked: its source, title, link, a status badge such as “Item page unreachable”, and a list of any tags that were missing from that page. Each item also has an Image details expander.
Use it to answer “is this every item or just one?” — the difference between a site-wide template gap and a single bad post.
Comparing previous runs
At the bottom of the page, Previous runs opens earlier results for the same feed. Compare two runs to confirm a fix worked, or to see whether an intermittent problem is still recurring.
Sharing a result
Copy Share Link copies a link to the current run — the fastest way to hand a result to someone else without screenshots or re-running anything.
That matters because many findings can only be fixed at the source, by the person who maintains the site the feed comes from. The share link gives them the evidence directly.
Findings: when the site is blocking us
These are the findings we see most often, grouped by what actually fixes them. First, when the site itself is refusing our requests — two findings that look similar but aren’t:
Some posts will have no preview at all. We could not load the linked pages, so social platforms can’t build a preview either and posts publish as bare links. This means the page is unreachable generally — broken links or a dead server. Check that the links in the feed resolve.
Previews may fail even though the pages exist. The pages loaded from one network location but not for dlvr.it directly. This means the page is up but something is refusing our request specifically — usually bot protection or a firewall rule, which is why allowlisting fixes it. Ask the site owner to allow dlvr.it so previews build reliably. If the site is behind Cloudflare, see Cloudflare: Allow dlvr.it to access your RSS feeds; for how we identify ourselves, see How dlvr.it identifies itself and how to control feed access.
Findings: when the site template is missing tags
When the pages load fine but a tag is missing from every one of them, that’s the template, not individual posts. For background on these tags, see What is Open Graph and why does it matter for social sharing?
Previews will be missing a title, preview text, or an image for X/Twitter. None of the pages we checked include the relevant tag. When none of the pages have it, ask whoever manages the site to add it to the template.
Some previews may look cropped or soft. Preview images are under the recommended 1200×630 px, though above the 200×200 minimum, so platforms may crop or downscale them. Larger source images preview better.
Findings: skipped checks you can ignore
Could not check for [tag]. This is a skipped check: no item pages could be read, so the tag was never examined. Fix the page-access issue above and re-run — these resolve themselves.
Common questions
Does running Medic change anything or send test posts?
No. Medic only reads — your feed, the pages it links to, and your posting history.Medic found issues but my posts are still going out. Which is right?
Both. Issues in Link previews mean posts publish as bare or broken-looking links: the post goes out, it just doesn’t look right.Medic says everything passed, but my feed still isn’t posting.
Check Feed History for the automation and confirm it’s set to Active. If both look right, contact us with a Medic share link.Why does it say “9 skipped”?
Because an earlier check failed and we couldn’t get far enough to test those. Fix the red issues and run it again.How often should I run it?
Whenever something looks wrong, and after a change you want to verify. There’s no benefit to running it on a schedule.