Check a site’s favicon for Google

How to use the tool

Enter a site address and click “Check”. The tool reads the home page, lists its icon tags, downloads each icon (eight at most) and reads the robots.txt of the site’s host and of the icons’ hosts. It shows the findings sorted into “To fix”, “To note” and “OK”, the icons with the format and dimensions measured on the file, and a preview.

If the home page declares no icon, the tool tries /favicon.ico and says so: the documentation asks for a tag in the home page; a file at the root is not enough.

What Google asks of a favicon

The favicon is declared with a link tag in the head of the home page, with rel="icon"; “shortcut icon” is also accepted for historical reasons, as are apple-touch-icon and apple-touch-icon-precomposed.¹ The address can be relative or absolute, and the file can be hosted on a CDN.¹

The image must be square (1:1 ratio) and at least 8 × 8 px. Google recommends more than 48 × 48 px so it looks good on various surfaces; the documentation read on October 18, 2026 does not require a multiple of 48. The accepted formats are BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF.¹ SVG is not listed.

Google supports one favicon per hostname: a subdomain such as news.example.com can have its own, a subdirectory such as example.com/news cannot. The file’s address should stay stable.¹ Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl the icon and Googlebot the home page, with no block.¹

What the tool checks

For each icon: the HTTP status of the address, the format recognised from the first bytes of the file (not from the type the server announces), the dimensions, whether it is square, the 8 × 8 px minimum and the advice of more than 48 × 48 px, any gap with the tag’s sizes attribute, any redirect. An ICO file is read image by image.

For the robots.txt, the tool applies Google’s rule: a crawler follows the group that carries its name, otherwise the * group. A 4xx status, except 429, is treated as no file at all and blocks nothing.² When the robots.txt has a Googlebot group but no Googlebot-Image group, the specification does not say whether the second follows the first: the tool flags it as uncertain rather than deciding.

After a fix

According to Google, a change to the home page can take from several days to several weeks to be crawled and processed. You can request indexing of the home page with the Search Console URL Inspection tool.¹ Meeting every guideline does not guarantee the favicon will be shown.¹

What the tool does not see

The tool does not judge the content of the image: Google replaces an inappropriate favicon, such as pornography or a hate symbol, with a default icon.¹ It does not see tags added by JavaScript after loading, does not check that the address stays stable over time, and cannot tell which icon Google will pick when several are declared.

It lists eight icons at most, reads each up to 256 KiB and queries three hosts at most for the robots.txt. Each check counts as one request against a quota of 20 per 10-minute window and per visitor, shared with the site’s other tools. The server returns the result and keeps neither the address nor the images.

After the test

A blocked favicon is often blocked by the robots.txt: the robots.txt generator lets you test a rule against an address, and the indexability checker shows whether the home page itself can be crawled. For the image shown when a page is shared, use the Open Graph tags tool: a different image, a different tag.

Frequently asked questions