Favicon
The small square icon for a website that Google can show next to the site's results in Google Search.
A favicon is the icon that represents your site. If your site has one, Google Search Central says it can be included in Google Search results for your site. It isn’t guaranteed to appear, even when you meet every guideline.
How to set it up
Add a <link rel="icon"> tag to the head of your home page, with its href pointing to your favicon file. Google also accepts shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon and apple-touch-icon-precomposed. The file can live on another host, such as a content delivery network.
Google’s guidelines:
- One favicon per site, where a site is a hostname. A subdirectory can’t have its own.
- Googlebot must be able to crawl your home page, and Googlebot-Image the icon file.
- The icon must be square and at least 8x8px. Google recommends larger than 48x48px.
- Supported formats are BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF.
- Keep the file’s address stable.
- Make it visually represent your brand. Google replaces an inappropriate icon with a default one.
How long a change takes
Crawling can take “anywhere from several days to several weeks”. You can ask Google to recrawl your home page with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
Related terms
Tools for it
Sources
Updated Oct 14, 2026.