Favicon checker
Check whether a website favicon meets Google Search requirements: square, at least 8×8px, declared with a supported rel, and crawlable by Googlebot-Image.
- Icon address
- -
No preview — the file could not be read as an image.
Every rule here comes from Google’s own favicon documentation, not from folklore.
This tool needs a server. A browser is not allowed to read another site’s markup, so ours fetches the page, reads only its <head>, and reports back. The address you enter is sent to our server; nothing about the check is stored.
What this does
Enter a site address and this fetches the page, finds every icon it declares, downloads them, and checks each one against the requirements Google publishes for favicons in search results. It reports what it found, what passes, and what would stop the icon appearing.
A favicon that looks perfect in your browser tab can still be absent from Google’s results. The browser is forgiving — it will take a rectangle, an undeclared file, an icon behind a redirect. Google is not.
What Google actually requires
These are Google’s own stated rules, not folklore:
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Square | A 1:1 aspect ratio. This is the hard one — a rectangular icon is not used at all |
| At least 8×8px | The floor. Google recommends larger than 48×48px, and a multiple of 48 is the usual advice |
A supported rel | icon, shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon, or apple-touch-icon-precomposed |
| Crawlable | Googlebot-Image must be able to fetch the icon, and Googlebot the home page. Neither may be blocked in robots.txt |
| A stable URL | Google asks that the favicon address not change often |
| One per site | A site here means a hostname. Subdirectories cannot have their own |
Google also declines to show icons it considers pornographic or hateful, replacing them with a default globe.
Why an icon that exists still does not show
In rough order of how often each is the actual cause:
- It is not square. A 32×16 logo crop is the commonest single reason. The browser scales it happily; Google skips it.
robots.txtblocks it. A blanketDisallow: /assets/written years ago for something else now covers the icon. Nothing in the page’s markup hints at this, which is why it goes unnoticed for so long — this tool checks it explicitly.- It is too small. A bare 16×16
favicon.icoclears the 8px floor but sits well under the 48px Google recommends, and looks soft everywhere it is shown. - Nothing is declared. Google will still find
/favicon.icoby convention, but a<link rel="icon">tag is the reliable route. - The URL keeps changing. A build that stamps a content hash into the icon filename gives Google a new address on every deploy, and it asks for a stable one.
- It is simply new. Google recrawls favicons on its own schedule, which can be weeks. A correct icon that was fixed yesterday may just need time — this tool tells you the icon is right, not that Google has looked again yet.
What a good declaration looks like
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">An .ico file can hold several sizes at once, and this tool lists every size it
declares rather than only the largest. SVG is a valid favicon format and is
checked the same way, except that a genuinely scalable SVG states no pixel size
— that is reported as a note, not a fault.
What is sent to our server
The address you enter. Our server fetches that page, reads only its <head>,
then fetches the icons it names and robots.txt. Nothing about the check is
stored, and no part of the page’s markup is returned to your browser — only the
list of icons found and the verdicts on them.
This is one of the few tools here that needs a server at all. A browser is not
permitted to read another site’s markup, and the icon has to be measured from
its own bytes to know its real dimensions rather than what a sizes attribute
claims.
Addresses that point inside a private network are refused rather than fetched, including any that a redirect leads to.
Related
If you need to make the icons rather than check them, the favicon generator produces a full set from a single image.