Google shows a blank globe instead of your favicon — what it requires

2026-10-12

You search for your own site and there it is — your title, your description, and next to them a generic globe where your logo should be. Other sites in the same results have their icons. Yours doesn't. Google isn't using a favicon for your site, and its documentation is specific about what it needs before it will.

Everything below about Google's requirements comes from Google Search Central's page Define a favicon to show in search results (checked 2026-10-08). The page itself is frank on one point worth stating first: meeting every guideline makes a site eligible, and a favicon still isn't guaranteed to appear.

The checklist Google documents

• A link tag on your home page. Google reads the favicon from a <link rel="icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico"> tag in the head of the home page. It also accepts shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon and apple-touch-icon-precomposed as rel values. A favicon file sitting on your server with no tag pointing to it is not what the documentation describes.
• Square. The favicon must have a 1:1 aspect ratio.
• At least 8×8 pixels — and Google recommends going larger than 48×48 so it looks good on various surfaces.
• A supported format: BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM or TIFF.
• Crawlable. Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl the favicon file, and Googlebot must be able to crawl the home page. A robots.txt rule that blocks either one blocks the favicon.
• A stable URL. Don't change the favicon's address frequently.
• One per hostname. A subdomain such as news.example.com can have its own; a subdirectory such as example.com/news cannot — it shares the site's.
• Representative of your brand, and not inappropriate; Google replaces imagery it deems inappropriate with a default icon.

The file doesn't have to live on your own domain — the same page notes that a favicon can be hosted on a CDN.

The usual reasons the globe stays

Going down that list, the common failures are mundane: the link tag is on inner pages but missing from the home page; the site sits in a subdirectory and expects its own icon; robots.txt blocks the folder the icon lives in; or the icon was swapped recently and Google simply hasn't been back. On that last one, the documentation says crawling can take anywhere from several days to several weeks, and suggests requesting indexing of the home page through the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.

How our favicon.ico lines up

Our favicon maker builds one .ico file containing your image at 16, 32 and 48 pixels, made in your browser. Against Google's list:

• Square: yes. A non-square image is centre-cropped to a square first, and the result tells you when that happened — so check that the crop kept the part of your logo you care about.
• Format: ICO is on Google's supported list.
• Minimum size: comfortably above 8×8.
• Stable URL: the download is always named favicon.ico, so replacing the file at the site root never changes its address.
• The recommendation: here we fall just short, honestly. Our largest size is exactly 48×48, and Google recommends larger than 48×48. The .ico is the right file for browser tabs and bookmarks; if you want to follow Google's recommendation as well, make a larger square PNG — crop your logo to 1:1 with the crop tool, then set an exact size such as 96×96 or 192×192 in the resize tool — and point your home page's rel="icon" link at that PNG. Keep favicon.ico at the root for everything that looks there by default.

Design for the size it is shown at

However large the file, the icon is displayed small beside your result. Bold, simple shapes survive that; thin lines and small text don't. A logo's compact mark or monogram usually reads better than the full wordmark.

The short version

• Link tag on the home page; square; at least 8×8, recommended larger than 48×48; crawlable; stable URL (Google Search Central, checked 2026-10-08).
• Eligibility isn't a guarantee, and changes can take days to weeks to show.
• Our .ico is square, ICO-format and always named favicon.ico — its largest size is 48, so add a larger square PNG if you want Google's recommended size.