Free favicon checker: fetch a URL or paste an icon file, get real pixel dimensions and a pass/fail audit against Google and Apple's actual rules, then see it rendered in a browser tab, a bookmark, a Google result and a phone home screen.
Check a favicon
Favicon preview
Browser tab
Your Page Title
Bookmark bar
Your Page Title
Google search result
example.com
Your Page Title
Your page's meta description would show here in a real result.
Phone home screen
example.com
Checks mirror Google's published favicon requirements and Apple's apple-touch-icon convention; icon files are loaded in your browser to read their real pixel dimensions, and browsers or search engines can still change their own display rules at any time.
How to use this favicon checker
01
Fetch a URL or paste an icon
Enter a site URL to pull every declared icon link tag, or paste one icon file's URL directly if you just want to check its dimensions.
02
Read the pass/fail audit
Each discovered icon is loaded in your browser to measure its real pixel size, then checked against Google's favicon rules and Apple's apple-touch-icon convention.
03
See it in context
The best available icon is rendered in a browser tab, a bookmark entry, a Google search result and a phone home screen, then Copy Link Tags hands you the HTML.
Why a favicon that looks fine can still fail
A favicon can render perfectly in every browser tab and still be invisible to Google, missing on an iPhone home screen, or silently blocked by robots.txt. Browsers are forgiving: they will scale down almost anything, including a lone SVG. Google Search is not; it documents a minimum size, a required square ratio, and a specific list of accepted formats that leaves SVG out entirely. This checker runs both sets of rules against your actual icon files rather than assuming the file that shows up in your tab is the one search engines see.
Fetching a URL reads the page's declared <link rel="icon">, apple-touch-icon and manifest tags server-side, the same way our SERP simulator reads title tags, since a browser can't read another site's HTML directly. Each icon file found is then loaded as a plain image in your own browser to confirm its real width and height, no CORS workaround needed since nothing but pixels get read.
Everything about the images themselves happens client-side. Your icon files are never uploaded, logged, or stored; the only network request is the optional URL fetch, which reads a page's existing tags through the same tiny function our SERP simulator uses.
Common questions
Google's own guidance calls for at least 8x8 pixels and recommends larger than 48x48 so it looks sharp across surfaces, always square. In practice, ship a 32x32 PNG or ICO for browser tabs, a 180x180 PNG for apple-touch-icon, and let a favicon.ico bundle cover legacy 16x16 lookups; that combination satisfies every surface this checker tests.
Yes. Google documents a minimum of 8x8 pixels, a square 1:1 aspect ratio, and support for BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM or TIFF, notably not SVG. The favicon URL also has to stay stable and be crawlable by Googlebot-Image, and Google shows only one favicon per hostname, so subdomains need their own.
It's the icon iOS and iPadOS use when someone adds your site to their home screen, declared with a separate link rel="apple-touch-icon" tag since Apple doesn't fall back to a regular favicon. Apple's own examples reference 180x180 for iPhone Retina and 152x152 or 167x167 for iPad, but modern practice is to ship one 180x180 PNG and let iOS scale it down.
The most common causes: the favicon file or the homepage is blocked in robots.txt, so Googlebot can't crawl either one, the icon is smaller than Google's 8x8 minimum, or the URL changed recently, since Google caches favicons and expects the same stable path over time. Confirm the icon actually loads first, then check robots.txt if it still doesn't show up after a few weeks.
Browsers accept ICO, PNG, GIF and even SVG for a tab icon, but Google's search favicon only supports BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF, SVG isn't on that list. An SVG-only favicon can look fine in a browser tab while never appearing in a Google search result, which is exactly the kind of gap this checker flags.
Each platform has its own favicon setting buried in a different menu, WordPress under Site Icon in the Customizer, Squarespace under Website Tools, Shopify under Theme Settings, and Wix under Site Icon in Site Settings, and all four aggressively cache the result, so a hard refresh or private window is often needed to see a real change. If the setting is saved but nothing shows here, the platform's CDN is usually still serving the old file.
Browsers and search engines fall back to requesting /favicon.ico from the site's root automatically, even with no link tag in the page at all. This checker tests that fallback path too whenever it finds no declared icon, so a site relying on the implicit favicon.ico convention still gets checked correctly rather than being reported as having no favicon.
Start from a simple, high-contrast square image, at least 260x260px so it downsamples cleanly, since fine detail disappears at 16x16. Any image editor or online favicon generator can then export the standard set: a 32x32 or 48x48 PNG or ICO for browsers, a 180x180 PNG for apple-touch-icon, and a favicon.ico as the universal fallback. Run the result back through this checker before you publish.
Fetching a URL reads that page's declared icon link tags server-side, the same way the SERP Simulator reads title tags, since a browser can't read another site's HTML directly. The actual icon files are then loaded and measured in your own browser to confirm their real pixel dimensions. Everything about the images themselves happens client-side; nothing you check is uploaded, logged, or stored.