The development of technology and internet has helped people in many aspects of life, including education. This change caused reading not only to be done by reading print books but also to be done online, and it is now becoming popular. Reading involves a variety of strategies that help the reader to understand the information of the text. Metacognitive strategies have many benefits that help readers understand the reading because metacognitive strategies are depicted as thinking processes applied to-self monitoring and self-regulating that the reader used to choose among different strategies in various contexts and various reading purposes. This research aims to explore the most preferable metacognitive online academic reading strategies and also to explain the implementation of this strategy practiced by EFL students. Descriptive qualitative research was used in conducting this research. The research participants were 100 EFL students of English education department at Walisongo State Islamic University in the academic year of 2021. Data were collected through the Online Survey Reading Strategies (OSORS) that spread using Google form link and online interviews using WhatsApp application. The result of this study revealed that Problem-solving was the most preferable strategy used by the students. The second dominantly used was Global reading strategies, and the last was Support reading strategies. The students were high users of metacognitive online reading strategies. They were highly aware and felt to be helped using metacognitive online reading strategies.