Favicon checker

What this tool does

Type a website address and the tool looks at everything that decides which small picture people see for it: the icon tags in the page head, the /favicon.ico file, the apple-touch-icon iPhones use, the web app manifest that Android and Chrome read, and the robots.txt rules that can stop Google from fetching any of them. It opens every icon file, reads the real size from the file itself instead of trusting the declared one, and lists errors, warnings and what passed. Each item says why it matters and how to fix it.

Then it draws the icon where people will meet it: in a browser tab (light and dark), in a Google result, on an iPhone home screen and as an Android install icon. It also asks Google's favicon service what it holds for your domain right now and says whether that is your icon, the generic globe or something else.

Three ways to check

• Check a URL. The address you type is sent to this site's server, which fetches the public page, its icons, its manifest and its robots.txt, and returns the facts as data. Nothing from the page is run or shown as page content, nothing is stored beyond a 60-second cache, and addresses that point at private networks are refused.
• Paste HTML. Paste the page source or just the head. It is read in your browser and nothing is sent. Without a network the icon files themselves cannot be loaded, so the checks cover what the tags say.
• Icon files. Add PNG, ICO, SVG, WebP or JPEG files from your device. Their real sizes, the sizes stored inside an ICO, file weight and transparency are measured on your device; nothing is uploaded.

Why Google may still show a globe

Google asks for a short list of things: the homepage and the icon file must both be crawlable, the icon address should stay stable, the file should be square with a side that is a multiple of 48 pixels (48, 96, 144), or an SVG, and one page can point to one icon. The checker tests each of those, including whether robots.txt blocks Googlebot or Googlebot-Image.

Even when everything passes, Google updates the icon in search results later than it recrawls your homepage, typically days to weeks. The panel called "What Google has cached right now" shows what Google's favicon service answers at this moment. That is a good sign of progress, but it is not the search results page itself, so a change may appear there before it appears in results.

What each place wants

• Browser tab: 16 px, sharper at 32 px on dense screens. A favicon.ico holding 16, 32 and 48 px covers old and new browsers.
• Google results: a square icon whose side is a multiple of 48 px, or an SVG, with a PNG or ICO fallback.
• iOS home screen: a 180 x 180 px opaque PNG as apple-touch-icon. iOS rounds the corners itself and fills transparent pixels with black.
• Android and install: 192 px and 512 px icons in the manifest, one with purpose "maskable" and the logo kept inside the central 80%, because Android crops icons to a circle or rounded square.

The favicon generator makes every one of these sizes from one image and gives you the head to paste. The article favicon sizes explained goes through why each size exists. If you also want links to look right when shared, the link preview checker does the same for Facebook, Zalo and Telegram, and the Open Graph tag generator writes the tags.

What it cannot tell you

Our server's address is not Google's, so rules that depend on the visitor's address, and Google's own caches, are not simulated: this is a close check, not the real crawler. If your robots.txt cannot be read, the checker assumes everything is allowed, which is the opposite of what the standard tells a crawler to do, and it says so. The drawings are approximate: browsers, phones and Google change their designs often.