Favicon Not Showing in Google Search Results? How to Fix It

The short answer

Google shows your favicon in search results only if your home page has a <link rel="icon"> tag, the icon is square, both the home page and the icon file can be crawled, and Google has had time to recrawl. Google recommends an icon larger than 48 × 48 pixels. Make a set of square PNGs, including 48, 192 and 512 pixels, with the Favicon Generator, add the tag to your home page, then ask Google to recrawl it in Search Console. Expect it to take days to weeks.

What Google requires

Google's Search Central page on favicons lists these rules:

• The tag must be on the home page. Put a <link> tag in the <head> of your home page. Google supports home pages at the domain level (example.com) and subdomain level (blog.example.com), but not subfolders (example.com/blog).
• Accepted rel values: icon, shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon and apple-touch-icon-precomposed.
• Square only. The image must have a 1:1 aspect ratio. The minimum is 8 × 8 pixels, but Google recommends larger than 48 × 48 so it looks sharp.
• Supported formats: ICO, PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP, PPM, TIFF. (SVG is not on that list.)
• Crawlable. Googlebot must be able to fetch the home page, and Googlebot-Image must be able to fetch the icon. Neither can be blocked in robots.txt.
• Stable URL. Do not change the icon's address often.
• One favicon per hostname. Every page on www.example.com shares the same icon in results.
• Appropriate content. Google replaces icons it considers inappropriate with a generic one.

Even when you follow all of this, Google says a favicon is not guaranteed to appear.

Step-by-step fix

1. Make a square icon at the right sizes

Start with your logo. If it is wide, crop it to the symbol or first letter; a wide logo squeezed into a square becomes unreadable at small sizes.

In the Favicon Generator:

Upload your logo (any image your browser can open).

Choose a background: white, black, transparent or any colour from the picker.

Set padding from 0% to 30%. Around 10% stops the edges touching the border.

Click Generate all favicon sizes. You get square PNGs at 16, 32, 48, 64, 128, 180, 192 and 512 pixels.

Download the sizes you need. Each file is named like favicon-48x48.png.

The generator always outputs a square, because it draws your image into a square canvas. If the original is not square, the image is stretched to fit, so crop it square first for the best result.

2. Upload the files and add the tags

Upload the files to your site, for example in the root folder. Then add tags to the <head> of your home page:

• <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="48x48" href="/favicon-48x48.png">
• <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="192x192" href="/favicon-192x192.png">
• <link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/favicon-180x180.png">

The generator also shows a ready-made snippet you can copy. Check that the file names in it match what you uploaded. The snippet refers to apple-touch-icon.png and favicon.ico, but the generator downloads PNGs named favicon-180x180.png and so on, and does not create an .ico file. Either rename your files to match the snippet or edit the href values.

3. Check the files load

Open each icon URL directly in your browser, such as https://yoursite.com/favicon-48x48.png. If you see a 404, a login page or a redirect loop, Google will not get it either.

Also open https://yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure there is no Disallow rule covering the icon path or image folder.

4. Ask Google to recrawl

In Google Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool on your home page URL and click Request indexing. Google says recrawling and processing can take from several days to several weeks.

Why it still is not showing

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
Generic globe icon in results	No favicon found, or not crawled yet	Check the tag is on the home page and request indexing
Old icon still showing	Google has not reprocessed	Keep the new URL stable and wait; request indexing again
Icon shows in browser tab but not Google	Tag only on inner pages, or file blocked for Googlebot-Image	Add the tag to the home page and check robots.txt
Blog at example.com/blog has no icon	Subfolder home pages are not supported	The domain's home page favicon is used for the whole hostname
Icon looks blurry	Source was too small	Upload a 192 or 512 pixel version and reference it
Icon squashed	Source image was not square	Crop to a square before generating

Browser tab versus search results

Browsers and Google use favicons differently. Your browser may show the new icon at once, or keep showing an old cached one for days. Google uses its own copy from the last crawl. A correct icon in your tab does not mean Google has it, and a stale tab icon does not mean Google is wrong. Test in a private window to bypass your browser cache.

Common mistakes

• Using a wide logo. It fails the square rule or becomes a thin line.
• Linking an SVG only. Browsers accept it, but SVG is not in Google's supported list. Add a PNG as well.
• Changing the file name on every deploy, for example with a cache-busting hash. Google prefers a stable URL.
• Putting the tag in a template used only for blog posts. It has to be on the home page.
• Blocking /assets/ or /images/ in robots.txt to save crawl budget, which also blocks the icon.

After the favicon

Search result appearance also depends on your title and description. If you are fixing the favicon, it is a good time to check them with the Meta Tag Generator. For a full list of what each favicon size is used for, see favicon sizes explained.