What is a Favicon? #
A favicon is a small icon that represents your website, shown next to your site’s listing in Google Search results to help users quickly identify your brand.
How to Implement a Favicon #
- Create a favicon image that follows Google’s guidelines:
- Must be square (1:1 aspect ratio)
- Minimum size: 8×8 pixels (recommended: 48×48 pixels or larger)
- Should visually represent your brand
- Any valid favicon file format is supported
- Must be square (1:1 aspect ratio)
- Add a link tag in the <head> section of your homepage HTML, like this:
<link rel=”icon” href=”/path/to/favicon.ico”>
- The rel attribute can be one of:
- icon (standard)
- shortcut icon (legacy support)
- apple-touch-icon or apple-touch-icon-precomposed (for iOS devices)
- icon (standard)
- The href can be a relative or absolute URL, hosted anywhere (your server or CDN).
Important Guidelines #
- Google only supports one favicon per site hostname (e.g., www.example.com is separate from news.example.com).
- Favicons on subdirectories like example.com/news are not supported separately; the favicon of the root hostname applies.
- Googlebot and Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl both the favicon file and your homepage (no blocking by robots.txt or server).
- The favicon URL should be stable and not change frequently.
- Google will not show favicons with inappropriate content (e.g., pornographic or hate symbols). If found, Google will replace it with a default icon.
- It may take days to weeks for Google to crawl and start showing your favicon after implementation. You can speed this up by requesting indexing via Search Console’s URL Inspection tool.