---
title: How to Define a Favicon for Google Search Results
description: "## 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 1. **Create…"
url: "https://fsidm.in/knowledge/seo/favicon/"
updated: "2025-09-18"
category: SEO
---

# How to Define a Favicon for Google Search Results

## 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

1. **Create a favicon image** that follows Google’s guidelines:

   - Must be square (1:1 aspect ratio)
   - Minimum size: 8x8 pixels (recommended: 48x48 pixels or larger)
   - Should visually represent your brand
   - Any valid favicon file format is supported
2. **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)
- 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.