Favicon: Declare the Icon Search Results Show
The favicon is the small icon in browser tabs, bookmarks and history. In Google’s mobile results it also appears next to your site name, where it helps people recognize your site at a glance. Without a usable one, Google shows a generic globe.
Why it matters
Browsers will look for /favicon.ico on their own, but search engines rely on the icon you declare
in your HTML. A recognizable icon in results is a small but real trust signal, and it’s one of the
few visual elements you control on a results page.
What we check
We look in the page’s HTML for a <link> element whose rel contains icon (this includes
rel="icon" and the older rel="shortcut icon").
| Result | When |
|---|---|
| Passed | a <link rel="icon"> with an href exists |
| Needs attention | no icon is declared |
We don’t download the icon (we only read the page you asked us to scan), so check the file yourself against the guidelines below.
Google’s requirements
According to Google’s favicon guidelines:
- The icon must be square, and at least 48 × 48 px; use a multiple of 48 (48, 96, 144…) or an SVG, which scales to any size.
- The icon URL must be stable and crawlable: don’t block it in robots.txt, and don’t change it often.
- It has to be declared on the home page with a
<link rel="icon">(orshortcut icon,apple-touch-icon) element. - It should represent your brand. Google won’t show icons it considers inappropriate.
How to fix
Add these lines to the <head> of every page (most templates have one shared head):
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.svg" type="image/svg+xml" />
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon-96.png" sizes="96x96" type="image/png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png" />
- The SVG version stays sharp everywhere and can even adapt to dark mode with a media query inside the file.
- The PNG covers browsers and services that don’t use SVG icons.
apple-touch-icon(180 × 180 px) is used when someone adds your site to an iPhone home screen.
Keep /favicon.ico at the root as well if you can; some older tools request it directly.
After changing the icon, it can take Google days or weeks to pick it up. Requesting indexing of your home page in Search Console can speed that up.
Further reading: Google Search Central: Define a favicon.