If your favicon is not showing in Google, check the basics first: Google shows it only if it can crawl the homepage, find a declared icon there, and fetch a square file in a supported format. Most missing favicons come down to one of the ten causes below. After a fix, Google needs days to weeks to recrawl, and you can speed that up by requesting indexing of the homepage in Search Console.
Google's favicon requirements
From Google's favicon guidelines, last updated October 27, 2026:
- One favicon per hostname.
example.comandshop.example.comcan differ;example.com/shopcannot have its own. - A
<link>in the homepage's<head>withrel="icon",rel="apple-touch-icon"orrel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed". - Googlebot can crawl the homepage, and Googlebot-Image can fetch the icon file.
- Square, at least 8×8 px; larger than 48×48 px recommended.
- BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM or TIFF.
- A stable URL that doesn't change often.
- Nothing inappropriate in the image; Google replaces such icons with a default one.
Ten reasons your favicon is missing
1. The icon isn't declared on the homepage
Google looks at the <head> of the homepage of the hostname, not of the page that ranks. Without a rel="icon" or rel="apple-touch-icon" link there, relying on /favicon.ico alone is a gamble.
2. robots.txt blocks Googlebot or Googlebot-Image
A Disallow: /images/ or Disallow: /*.png$ rule can hide the icon from Googlebot-Image. The homepage itself must be crawlable too, including every redirect on the way to it.
3. A firewall or bot check answers instead of the file
Bot protection, geo-blocking and challenge pages can serve Google something other than the icon. The file has to come back as the image itself, with status 200, to a crawler request.
4. The format isn't supported
SVG and WebP are not on Google's list. Keep your SVG for browsers, but declare a PNG or ICO next to it.
5. The icon isn't square
A 64×48 logo doesn't qualify. Pad it to a square canvas.
6. The icon is too small
8×8 is the floor, but small icons look blurry on high-density screens. Google recommends more than 48×48; the 180×180 Apple touch icon is an easy way to get there.
7. The URL is broken or redirects
A 404, a chain of redirects, or an HTML page sent with status 200 instead of the image all fail. Single-page apps that answer every path with index.html do this to /favicon.ico often.
8. The site lives in a subdirectory
A blog at example.com/blog gets the favicon of example.com. To show a different icon it needs its own hostname, such as blog.example.com.
9. The icon URL keeps changing
Build tools that put a hash into the filename on every release give Google a new URL each time. Keep a stable path for the icon Google should use.
10. Google hasn't recrawled yet
Crawling the homepage again can take from a few days to a few weeks. In Search Console, open URL Inspection for the homepage and choose Request indexing. Then wait; asking again doesn't speed it up.
How to check all of this at once
Favicon Checker runs the Google checks on any site: supported format, square size, more than 48 px, declared on the homepage, allowed by robots.txt and served without redirects. It also shows which icon Google is likely to pick.