Is Google showing a default icon next to your site instead of your logo? Google has just made one possible reason easier to spot.
What changed
On October 27, 2026, Google updated its Search Central guide Define a favicon to show in search results, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. The page shows "Last updated 2026-10-27 UTC." One of the eligibility guidelines was reworded. It now says:
According to Search Engine Roundtable, it previously said: "Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl the favicon file and Googlebot must be able to crawl the home page; they cannot be blocked for crawling."
The new part is the redirects. If your home page redirects somewhere (for example from example.com to www.example.com/en/), Google has to be able to follow that redirect and reach the page where your favicon <link> tag sits. The guide also now says that the URLs must not be blocked by robots.txt "or by other means."
Is this a new rule?
It reads more like a clarification than a policy change. Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz wrote that it "seems more like a clarification than anything else but it is a good clarification." The change is not listed in Google's documentation changelog, and it isn't a ranking update.
Google's John Mueller explained the reason, as quoted in an update to the Roundtable article: "we did this because we saw how AI systems didn't understand exactly how to investigate this." He said Google tried the new wording as a prompt and saw that it worked much better. So the guide now spells out each step a crawler takes: home page, redirects, then the favicon file.
Remember that Google says a favicon isn't guaranteed to appear, even if all guidelines are met.
What to do
- Check what your home page does. Open your bare domain (for example http://example.com) and see where it ends up. One clean redirect to your main home page is fine. Look out for long redirect chains, loops, and redirects that depend on cookies, location or language detection. Googlebot may not end up where you expect.
- Make sure the final page has the favicon tag. The page you land on should include something like <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico"> in its <head>.
- Check robots.txt. Don't block your home page, the redirect target, or the favicon file. Watch for broad rules like "Disallow: /*.ico" or blocked asset folders.
- Check "other means". Firewalls, bot protection, CDN rules or login walls that challenge Googlebot can stop it from reaching the page or the file.
- Follow the size rules. Google wants a square (1:1) icon of at least 8x8px and recommends one larger than 48x48px. Supported formats are BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF. Keep the favicon URL stable.
- Ask Google to recrawl. After a fix, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to request indexing of your home page. Google says crawling can take anywhere from several days to several weeks.
Check your crawl settings
SEOSFT does not check favicons. Its Indexability check does list pages that robots.txt blocks for Googlebot, pages that redirect, and pages that return errors.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Define a favicon to show in search results (last updated Oct 27, 2026): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/favicon-in-search
- Search Engine Roundtable, Googlebot Must Follow Redirects From Homepage To Favicon, Updated Doc Says (Oct 27, 2026): https://www.seroundtable.com/googlebot-redirects-from-homepage-to-favicon-42396.html