Agent Wranglers

SEO-46Recommended

Give search results a favicon they can show

Link a square favicon larger than 48 by 48 pixels, in PNG or ICO, from the home page. Serve it at a stable address that robots.txt lets image crawlers fetch.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Google shows a favicon next to each result only when it is square, crawlable by Googlebot-Image, and on a home page Googlebot may crawl. It recommends a size larger than 48 by 48 pixels. Its list of supported formats has BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF, but not SVG. So link a PNG or ICO next to any SVG icon. Keep the file's address the same for years. Ship the rest of the icons as Ship a full set of icons says.

Examples

HTML example

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon-96.png" sizes="96x96" type="image/png">
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">

How to check

The home page has a <link rel="icon"> pointing to a PNG or ICO file. The file answers 200 with an image type, is square and wider than 48 pixels, and robots.txt allows it for Googlebot-Image.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/seo/search-result-appearance/search-favicon">Agent Wranglers SEO playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.