You’ve set up your favicon. It looks perfect in the browser tab. But when you search for your website on Google, the favicon is just not there, or it shows a generic globe icon instead of your logo.
Frustrating, right?
The good news is: this is a very common problem, and in most cases, it can be fixed. This guide will walk you through every possible reason why your favicon isn’t showing up in Google Search, and exactly what you need to do to fix it.
First, Let’s Understand What a Favicon in Google Search Even Is
When you search something on Google, you’ll notice small icons next to each search result. Those tiny icons are called favicons. Google pulls them from your website and displays them next to your website’s name in the search results.
If your favicon isn’t showing up, Google is either:
- Unable to find or access your favicon file
- Finding a favicon that doesn’t meet its requirements
- Still in the process of crawling and indexing your updated favicon
Let’s go through each possible cause one by one.
Step 1: Validate Your Favicon First
Before anything else, run your favicon through a checker tool to see if there’s a technical issue.
Use this free tool: https://faviconcheck.tamethebots.com/
This tool will tell you:
- Whether your favicon file is returning a proper 200 OK response (meaning it’s actually accessible)
- Whether your favicon dimensions are correct
- Whether the file format is supported
- Whether your favicon is being blocked by your robots.txt file
- Whether your favicon is valid or not
Running this check takes less than a minute and can instantly tell you what’s wrong without you having to dig through your code manually.
Step 2: Check Your Favicon Size
This is one of the most overlooked reasons why favicons don’t appear in Google Search.
Google has a minimum size requirement of 8×8 pixels, but here’s the important part: Google recommends 48×48 pixels or larger for favicons to appear in search results.
If your favicon is only 16×16 or 32×32 pixels, it might display perfectly in your browser tab, but Google may consider it under-recommended and choose not to show it in search results.
What you should do:
- Use a favicon that is at least 48×48 pixels
- Make sure it is perfectly square (1:1 ratio), for example, 48×48, 64×64, 96×96, or 128×128 pixels
- Avoid rectangular favicons; Google requires a square shape
If your current favicon is smaller than 48×48, simply create a larger version of it and update the file. Most image editing tools (even free ones like Canva or GIMP) can resize images easily.
Step 3: Check How Your Favicon Is Declared in Your HTML
Google needs to find your favicon through the HTML code of your homepage. The correct way to declare a favicon is by using a <link rel="icon"> tag inside the <head> section of your HTML.
Here’s what correct implementation looks like:
html
<head>
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.png" type="image/png">
</head>Sounds simple, right? But there are a few common mistakes that break this:
Problem 1: Favicon tag is outside the <head> section
The <link rel="icon"> tag must be inside <head> — if it’s placed in the <body> section, Google may not recognize it. Also, if you have invalid HTML elements inside your <head> section, Google’s crawler may stop reading your <head> before it ever reaches your favicon tag.
Problem 2: Invalid HTML elements inside <head> are breaking parsing
Here’s something most people don’t realize: The only valid elements inside <head> are: <title>, <meta>, <link>, <script>, <style>, <base>, <noscript>, and <template>. Elements like <div>, <img>, or <iframe> inside <head> can happen due to badly written plugins or themes and will silently break favicon detection.
The only elements that are valid inside <head> are:
<title><meta><link><script><style><base><noscript><template>
Elements like <div>, <img>, or <iframe> are not valid inside <head>. If any of these are present in your <head> section (which can happen due to badly written plugins or themes), Google may stop parsing the <head> before it reads your favicon tag, and your favicon simply won’t be found.
What to do: Open your page’s source code (right-click → View Page Source in your browser) and check if your <head> section contains any unusual or non-standard elements. Remove anything that doesn’t belong there.
Step 4: Make Sure Google Can Actually Crawl Your Favicon
Even if everything is coded correctly, your favicon won’t show in search results if Google’s bot can’t access it. **This is one of the most common technical SEO oversights — if you want a deeper understanding of how Google accesses your pages and files, read our guide on Making Googlebot’s Job Easy.
Google uses two different bots to process your favicon:
- Googlebot crawls your homepage to find the favicon tag in your HTML
- Googlebot-Image fetches the actual favicon image file
If either of these bots is blocked, your favicon will not appear.
Check your robots.txt file
Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any rules that might be blocking Googlebot or Googlebot-Image from accessing your homepage or your favicon file.
A blocking rule might look something like this:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /It could also block specific folders where your favicon is stored, like /images/ or /assets/. Robots.txt blocking issues cause far more problems than most site owners realize — see our full guide on What Are Crawl Errors and How to Fix Them for a complete breakdown of how to diagnose and resolve them.
If you’re using WordPress, check your SEO plugin settings — some plugins accidentally block image crawling. If you’re not sure how your .htaccess file or server configuration might be interfering, our guide on What Is .htaccess File explains how these rules work and how to read them safely.
Step 5: Understand Google’s One Favicon Per Hostname Rule
Google only supports one favicon per site, where a “site” is defined by its hostname.
Here’s what that means practically:
https://example.com– supported (domain-level homepage)https://news.example.com– supported (subdomain-level homepage)https://example.com/news– NOT supported (subdirectory-level page)
So if you’re trying to set a different favicon for a subdirectory like /blog or /shop, Google won’t show it. The favicon applies to the entire hostname, not individual sections of your site.
If you have multiple subdomains (like shop.example.com and blog.example.com), each one can have its own favicon since they are separate hostnames.
Step 6: Check Your Favicon File Format
Google supports all valid favicon formats. The most commonly used formats are:
- PNG: most recommended for modern websites
- ICO: traditional format, still widely supported
- SVG: scalable, works well for high-resolution screens
Any of these formats will work. Just make sure the file isn’t corrupted and is returning a proper 200 OK response when accessed directly in a browser. You can test this by going directly to your favicon URL (for example, https://yourdomain.com/favicon.ico) in your browser. If it shows the image, it’s accessible. If you get a 404 error, the file path in your HTML is wrong or the file doesn’t exist at that location.
Step 7: Keep Your Favicon URL Stable
This is a simple but important rule: don’t keep changing your favicon’s file path or URL.
Every time you change the favicon URL, Google has to reprocess and recrawl the new location. This causes delays. If the URL keeps changing, you may find that your favicon disappears from search results for extended periods.
Once you set your favicon at a URL like /favicon.png or /assets/icons/favicon.png, keep it there. Don’t rename the file or move it to a different folder unless absolutely necessary.
Step 8: Make Sure Your Favicon Follows Google’s Content Policy
Google will not display favicons that contain inappropriate, hateful, or explicit content. If Google determines that a favicon violates its content policies, it will replace it with a default generic icon instead.
Your favicon should be a clean, professional representation of your website’s brand. If your favicon was recently replaced with a generic icon without any technical changes on your end, this might be why.
Step 9: Wait, Sometimes It Just Takes Time
This is probably the hardest part for most website owners to accept: even if everything is implemented perfectly, your favicon may not appear in Google Search immediately.
Google needs to:
- Crawl your homepage
- Find the favicon tag
- Send Googlebot-Image to fetch the favicon file
- Process and validate the favicon
- Update your search result appearance
This is the same reason why new pages or updates often take time to reflect in search results — if you’ve been seeing a “Crawled – Currently Not Indexed” status in Google Search Console, that guide explains exactly why Google delays acting on content it has already crawled.
This entire process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on how frequently Google crawls your site.
What you can do to speed things up:
Use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to request reindexing of your homepage.
Here’s how:
- Go to Google Search Console (search.google.com/search-console)
- Enter your homepage URL in the URL Inspection tool
- Click “Request Indexing”
This signals to Google that your page has been updated and prompts a faster recrawl. It doesn’t guarantee an immediate update, but it typically speeds up the process compared to waiting for Google to crawl your site on its own schedule.
Quick Summary: Complete Favicon Checklist
Here’s everything you should verify before waiting for Google to update:
- Run the favicon validation tool at https://faviconcheck.tamethebots.com/ to spot any obvious issues instantly
- Check your favicon size – it should be at least 48×48 pixels and perfectly square
- Check your HTML implementation – use
<link rel="icon">inside a valid<head>section, and make sure there are no invalid elements inside<head>that could break parsing - Check your robots.txt, make sure neither Googlebot nor Googlebot-Image is blocked from your homepage or favicon file
- Verify your favicon URL is accessible, open the favicon URL directly in your browser and confirm it loads without errors
- Don’t change your favicon URL frequently, keep the file path stable
- Request reindexing using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool after making any fixes
- Be patient, even after doing everything right, it can take a few days to a few weeks for changes to reflect in search results
One Last Thing: What If Nothing Works?
If you’ve gone through every step above and your favicon is still not appearing after several weeks, here are a few more things to check:
- Make sure your website itself is not blocked from being indexed (check for a
noindextag or aDisallow: /rule in robots.txt that blocks all bots) - If your pages aren’t being discovered or indexed at all, this broader issue may be what’s actually holding things back — our guide on Why Your Web Page Is Not Appearing in Google covers all the reasons a page might be invisible to Google despite being live.
- Confirm that your website actually appears in Google Search results at all, if your site isn’t indexed, your favicon obviously won’t show either
- Try searching your exact domain in Google (type
site:yourdomain.com) to confirm your pages are indexed
If your site appears in results but the favicon doesn’t, and you’ve implemented everything correctly, you may want to post in the Google Search Central Help Community with your specific details. And if you want a complete audit of everything that could be affecting how Google sees your site, our Technical SEO Checklist for 2025 covers every major technical factor in one place.
Getting your favicon to show up in Google Search is mostly about following Google’s technical guidelines correctly and then giving Google enough time to process the changes. Most issues come down to wrong dimensions, incorrect HTML placement, crawl blocking, or simply not having waited long enough after making fixes.
Go through the checklist above step by step, and in most cases, you’ll have your favicon showing up in search results within a week or two.
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