Why Your Favicon Is Not Showing in Google Search Results

A client rang me last year, slightly embarrassed, to ask why every competitor in her town had a little logo beside their name in Google and her bakery had a grey globe. The favicon showed perfectly in her browser tab. She had uploaded it months earlier. Google simply was not using it.

This is one of the most common small complaints I hear from people running their own sites, and it matters more than it looks. On a phone, the favicon sits right next to your site name at the top of every result, and a generic globe makes a page look abandoned beside neighbours with tidy logos. The good news is that the cause is nearly always one of six or seven things, and most of them take minutes to fix.

Why the browser tab is not proof

The first thing to understand is that your browser and Google look for favicons in different ways. A browser will happily show a 16 by 16 pixel favicon.ico it finds at the root of your domain, even if nothing in your page code mentions it. It also caches that icon for a long time, so the tab can keep showing an old version long after the file has changed.

Google is stricter. It reads the favicon declared in the code of your homepage, fetches that file with its own crawler, and then checks it against a short list of requirements. If any step fails, it falls back to the globe without telling you why. So a working browser tab only proves the file exists. It says nothing about whether Google can find it, fetch it, or accept it.

The requirements Google actually checks

Google's own documentation is short, and it is worth reading once. The points that trip people up are these:

• The icon must be declared with a link element in the head of the homepage, such as rel="icon", rel="shortcut icon" or rel="apple-touch-icon". A file sitting at the root with no link is not enough.
• The image must be square, and its size should be a multiple of 48 pixels: 48 by 48, 96 by 96, 144 by 144 and so on. An SVG works too, because it has no fixed size.
• Both the homepage and the image file must be crawlable. A robots.txt rule that blocks the folder the icon lives in will quietly stop it.
• Google shows one favicon per hostname. A site living in a subfolder, like a shop at yourbakery.co.uk/store, gets the favicon of yourbakery.co.uk.
• The icon has to be a reasonable picture of your brand. Anything Google considers inappropriate is replaced with the default.

The 48 pixel rule surprises a lot of people. A favicon exported at 32 by 32, which many design tools still suggest, does not meet it. Google sometimes accepts it anyway, but I would not rely on that.

What usually goes wrong on WordPress

Most of the sites I look after run WordPress, and here the favicon is set under Appearance, Customize, Site Identity, as the "Site Icon". You upload a square image of at least 512 by 512 pixels and WordPress outputs several sizes, including 32 by 32 and 192 by 192. The 192 version meets the 48 pixel rule, so a fresh WordPress install with a site icon is usually fine.

Problems begin when something else interferes. Some themes add their own favicon field and print a second, smaller link that appears before the WordPress one. Some SEO or performance plugins strip "unnecessary" tags from the head. And a few older themes hard code a link to a favicon.ico that no longer exists after a redesign. I once found a site declaring three different favicons, one of which pointed to a file deleted in 2019.

Caching adds a further layer of confusion. If a caching plugin or a CDN is serving an old copy of your homepage, Google will keep seeing old code even after you have fixed it. We have a whole piece on why caching plugins sometimes hide your own content updates, and the same logic applies here: clear the cache after any change to the head.

The "just wait" advice is only half right

The standard reply in forums is that Google takes time, so wait a few weeks. Waiting is part of it. Google recrawls favicons on its own schedule, and in my experience a correct new icon usually appears somewhere between four days and about five weeks later. My bakery client's took 23 days.

But waiting only works if the setup is correct. I have seen people wait four months for an icon that could never appear because their security plugin was challenging unfamiliar crawlers and the image request never succeeded. Check first, then wait.

A troubleshooting order that saves time

When a client asks about a missing favicon, this is the order I work through. It goes from the quickest checks to the slowest.

1. Open your homepage, right click and choose View Page Source. Search for "icon". Make sure there is at least one link and note every file it points to.
2. Open each of those file addresses in a private window. They should load as images, not as a 404 page or a redirect to the homepage.
3. Check the pixel size of the largest one. If none is square and a multiple of 48, export a new 96 by 96 or 192 by 192 PNG, or use an SVG.
4. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any Disallow rule that covers the icon's folder, such as /wp-content/uploads/ or /images/.
5. Remove duplicate declarations. Keep one clean set, ideally the one WordPress generates from the Site Icon.
6. Clear every cache: the plugin, the host's server cache and the CDN if you use one.
7. In Google Search Console, open URL Inspection for your homepage, run a live test to confirm Google can fetch it, then click Request Indexing.

Step seven does not force Google to update the favicon immediately, but it does put the homepage back in the queue, and the favicon is fetched from the homepage.

A note on the rest of your search snippet

While you are looking at how your site appears in results, check the text under the title too. A sharp favicon beside a vague description still loses clicks. Our colleague Anouk's guide on writing meta descriptions that earn clicks pairs well with this fix, since both change how your listing looks before anyone visits.

Your job for this week

Open your homepage source today and count the icon links. If there is more than one, or if the largest image is not a multiple of 48 pixels, fix that first, clear the cache, and request indexing in Search Console. Then put a reminder in your calendar for three weeks from now to search your brand name on a phone and look. If the globe is still there by then, go back through the list above from step two. There are more small fixes like this one in our web tips section.