Favicon Checker: Test Your Site Icon

How to check a website favicon online and read the result

To check a favicon, enter the homepage address in the form above (for example example.com), not an inner URL: search engines take the icon from the homepage. The favicon checker downloads the HTML, finds every <link> tag whose rel contains icon (icon, shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon, apple-touch-icon-precomposed), reads the icons listed in the web app manifest and, if no .ico file is declared in the markup, separately tests whether /favicon.ico in the site root returns 200.

Every icon found is shown as a card. How to read it:

• Blue badge — the rel value. manifest icon means the icon came from the manifest file; shortcut icon pointing to /favicon.ico with no tag in the HTML means the file was found only at the default path.
• Grey badge — the sizes attribute as declared in the code. It is the claimed size, not a measurement: if the tag says 32x32 but the file is really 16×16, browsers and Google get 16×16. Open the file with the Download button and check the actual pixels.
• Type under the badges — the type attribute (image/png, image/svg+xml, image/x-icon).
• A “?” instead of the image — the browser could not load the file at that address: a 404, a redirect to an HTML page, a wrong path or hotlink protection. Test that URL with the HTTP status checker.

If the tool reports that no favicon was found, the HTML has no icon tags and /favicon.ico does not return 200. A common cause is an icon injected by JavaScript after page load: neither this favicon tester nor some crawlers see such a tag. Serve the icon in the initial HTML.

Why Google is not showing your favicon in search results

If a grey globe appears next to your result instead of your icon, compare your setup with Google’s favicon guidelines. The key points:

1. A tag on the homepage. The homepage of the hostname needs <link rel="icon"> (or shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon). Google shows one favicon per hostname: shop.example.com can have its own, a folder like example.com/blog/ cannot.
2. A square that is a multiple of 48 px. 48×48, 96×96, 144×144, 192×192. A 16×16 or 32×32 icon works in a browser tab but is not enough for Google Search. SVG has no size restriction.
3. Crawlable file. Googlebot-Image must be able to fetch the icon file and Googlebot must be able to crawl the homepage. Rules such as Disallow: /*.ico or a blocked folder that holds the icon (/wp-content/uploads/, /assets/) break it. Test your file in the robots.txt checker.
4. A stable URL. Do not change the icon address on every deploy (hashed file names) — Google cannot keep up.
5. A brand-representative image with nothing inappropriate — otherwise Google replaces it with a default icon.

How long it takes and how to speed it up

The favicon is not refreshed on every crawl; expect anything from a few days to several weeks. To speed things up: fix the tags, make sure the icon returns 200 and is not blocked by robots.txt, then run URL Inspection on the homepage in Search Console and click Request Indexing. Repeated requests do not help. You can preview how the result will look with the SERP preview tool.

The complete favicon tag set for 2026

You no longer need twenty icon variants. This set in the <head> of the homepage (and every template) covers modern browsers, Google, iOS and Android:

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon-96x96.png" sizes="96x96" type="image/png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">
<link rel="manifest" href="/site.webmanifest">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#0f172a">

The site.webmanifest file:

{
  "name": "Example",
  "icons": [
    { "src": "/icon-192.png", "sizes": "192x192", "type": "image/png" },
    { "src": "/icon-512.png", "sizes": "512x512", "type": "image/png" }
  ],
  "theme_color": "#0f172a",
  "background_color": "#ffffff",
  "display": "standalone"
}

ICO serves legacy browsers and tools that request /favicon.ico directly. SVG stays sharp on any screen (you can add @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) inside the SVG for dark mode). The 96×96 PNG satisfies Google’s multiple-of-48 rule. The 180×180 Apple touch icon, without transparency, is what iPhones put on the home screen. The manifest with 192 and 512 icons is used by Android and PWAs. If manifest icons do not show up in the check, make sure the manifest is valid JSON and that rel="manifest" comes before href in the <link> tag.

Favicon sizes at a glance

How to add a favicon in WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace and Wix

WordPress

Use the built-in Site Icon: Appearance → Customize → Site Identity, or Settings → General in block themes. Upload a square PNG of at least 512×512 — WordPress generates 32×32, 180×180, 192×192 and 270×270 versions and prints the tags in <head>. Do not add a second icon through an SEO plugin or header.php: two tag sets pointing to different files is a frequent reason for the “wrong” icon.

Shopify

Online Store → Themes → Customize → Theme settings → Logo/Favicon. Many themes output the icon scaled down to 32×32, which is too small for Google Search — add an extra tag in theme.liquid pointing to a 96×96 or 192×192 PNG.

Squarespace, Wix and other builders

Look for a Favicon or Browser icon field in the site settings, upload a large square image, publish, then run the homepage through this checker to confirm the icon is in the HTML and its URL opens.

Custom sites

Put favicon.ico and the PNGs in the web root and the tags above in your shared header template. On nginx it is worth silencing logs and setting a cache lifetime:

location = /favicon.ico {
    access_log off;
    log_not_found off;
    expires 7d;
}

Why the browser still shows the old favicon

Browsers cache favicons separately from pages, so a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5) often does nothing. What helps:

• Open the icon file directly (example.com/favicon.ico) and reload it — that refreshes the cache for that exact file.
• Version the URL: /favicon.ico?v=2, or rename the file. Change it only when the design changes, not on every deploy.
• Check in a private window or here: this tool fetches the page from the server and does not depend on your browser cache.
• If a CDN still serves the old file, purge the CDN cache for the icon.

Google’s cache is separate: the new icon shows up in search after the homepage is recrawled, whatever you see locally. The image that social networks and messengers pull when a link is shared is og:image, not the favicon — test it with the Open Graph debugger. More on how the tool works is in the documentation.