Define Website Favicon for Search Results | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers Skip to main content Google Search Central Documentation SEO fundamentals Introduction Search Essentials SEO Starter Guide Optimizing for generative AI search How Google Search Works Do you need an SEO? 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Crawling and indexing Sitemaps robots.txt Meta tags Crawler management Removals Canonicalization Redirects JavaScript SEO Ranking and search appearance Visual Elements gallery Title links Snippets Images Videos Structured data Favicons Site-specific guides Ecommerce International and multilingual sites Data analysis Get started with Search Console Debug traffic drops Using Search Console and Google Analytics data for SEO Get started with Google Trends All updates Documentation updates Ranking updates New YouTube videos Recent podcast episodes Home Search Central Documentation Send feedback Define a favicon to show in search results If your site has a favicon , it can be included in Google Search results for your site. This documentation is for organic search results. For logos on Google Ads results, visit the business logo specifications . An illustration that shows how favicon may look like in a search result. Favicon Implementation Here's how to make your site eligible for a favicon in Google Search results: Create a favicon that follows the guidelines . Add a <link> tag to the header of your home page with the following syntax: <link rel="icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico"> To extract the favicon information, Google relies on the following attributes of the link element: Attributes rel Google supports the following rel attribute values for specifying a favicon; use whichever one fits your use case: icon The icon that represents your site, as defined in the HTML standard . For historical reasons, we also support shortcut icon , which is an earlier, alternative version of icon . apple-touch-icon An iOS-friendly icon that represents your site, per Apple's developer documentation . apple-touch-icon-precomposed An alternative icon for earlier versions of iOS, per Apple's developer documentation . href The URL of the favicon. The URL can be a relative path ( /smile.ico ) or absolute path ( https://example.com/smile.ico ). The URL doesn't need to be hosted on your site (for example, your favicon could be hosted on a content delivery network (CDN)). Allow time for Google to recrawl and process the new information on your home page. Remember that crawling can take anywhere from several days to several weeks, depending on how often our systems determine content needs to be refreshed. You can request indexing of your site's home page by using the URL Inspection tool. Guidelines You must follow these guidelines to be eligible for a favicon in Google Search results. A favicon isn't guaranteed to appear in Google Search results, even if all guidelines are met. Google Search only supports one favicon per site, where a site is defined by the hostname. For example, https://www.example.com/ and https://code.example.com/ are two different hostnames, and therefore can have two different favicons. However, https://www.example.com/sub-site is a subdirectory of a site, and you can only set one favicon for https://www.example.com/ , which applies to the site and its subdirectories. Supported : https://example.com (this is a domain-level home page) Supported : https://news.example.com (this is a subdomain-level home page) Not supported : https://example.com/news (this is a subdirectory-level home page) Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl the favicon file and Googlebot must be able to crawl the home page; they cannot be blocked for crawling. To help people quickly identify your site when they scan through search results, make sure your favicon is visually representative of your website's brand. Your favicon must be a square (1:1 aspect ratio) that's at least 8x8px. While the minimum size requirement is 8x8px, we recommend using a favicon that's larger than 48x48px so that it looks good on various surfaces. Any valid favicon format is supported. The favicon URL must be stable (don't change the URL frequently). Google won't show any favicon that it deems inappropriate, including pornography or hate symbols (for example, swastikas). If this type of imagery is discovered within a favicon, Google replaces it with a default icon. Submit feedback about favicons in search results If you have feedback about Google's handling of favicons in search results, fill out our favicon feedback form . Note that feedback submitted here is designed to help our teams to improve the systems in Google Search overall and doesn't guarantee it will be acted upon individually. Send feedback Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Last updated 2026-02-04 UTC. Need to tell us more? [[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2026-02-04 UTC."],[],["To show a favicon in Google Search results, create a square favicon (at least 8x8px, preferably \u003e48x48px) and add a `\u003clink\u003e` tag to your home page's header. Use `rel=\"icon\"` (or `shortcut icon`, `apple-touch-icon`, `apple-touch-icon-precomposed`) and `href` attributes with the favicon's URL. Ensure Googlebot-Image and Googlebot can crawl both the favicon and home page. Favicon must be appropriate and visually representative of the brand. 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