Favicon size for Google: at least 8×8, over 48×48 recommended — and SVG isn’t on the list

The short version

• Favicon size for Google: square, at least 8×8 pixels, and Google recommends "larger than 48x48px". Google’s guidelines set no maximum.
• Formats Google supports: "BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, and TIFF". SVG and WebP are not on the list.
• This is a clarification, not a new rule. Until 28 August the page said "Any valid favicon format is supported." Google says its supported formats "haven't changed"; it has simply written them down.
• Favicon not showing in Google? Check it is square, in a listed format, linked from your home page, crawlable, at a stable address, and give Google days to weeks to recrawl.
• 🚩 We checked our own site on 23 and 25 September and it fails: our home page declares an SVG icon and a 1200×630 image, neither of which meets Google’s rules as written.

What size should a favicon be for Google?

Google’s favicon guidelines answer it in two sentences:

“Your favicon must be a square (1:1 aspect ratio) that's at least 8x8px. While the minimum size requirement is 8x8px, we recommend using a favicon that's larger than 48x48px so that it looks good on various surfaces.”

So the rule is square, and at least 8×8. The recommendation is larger than 48×48. Google does not set a maximum at all. In practice we would make a square PNG at 96×96 or 192×192, which clears the recommendation comfortably and still looks sharp when a screen scales it down. That size is our suggestion, not Google’s: the guideline says only “larger than 48x48px”.

The word doing the most work is square. A wide logo squeezed into a favicon slot is the commonest way to break the rule without noticing, and it is exactly how we broke it ourselves (more on that below).

Which favicon formats does Google support?

Since 28 August 2026 the guideline has named them:

“Google Search supports the following favicon file formats: BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, and TIFF.”

Before that, the same page said "Any valid favicon format is supported." and linked to Wikipedia’s table of favicon formats. We checked the wording in the Internet Archive’s copy from 12 August, when the page was last updated 4 February 2026; one sentence changed between that copy and today’s, and it is that one. Today’s version of that Wikipedia table includes SVG and WebP among the formats browsers support. Neither SVG nor WebP is on Google’s list.

It would be easy to read that as Google dropping SVG. It is not. Google’s documentation updates page says of the 28 August change:

“Previously, the documentation linked to an external reference that evolved over time and caused ambiguity about which favicon file formats are actually supported in Google Search. Google Search's supported file formats haven't changed; this update explicitly lists them in the documentation.”

So the honest reading is that, by Google’s own account, SVG was not supported before 28 August either; the old wording simply made it look as if anything a browser could show would do. If your site builder or designer gave you an SVG favicon because it is crisp at every size, it probably looks lovely in a browser tab. Browser tabs and Google’s search results are two different places with two different lists.

Why is my favicon not showing in Google?

Work down this list. Every item is from Google’s own guideline except where we say otherwise.

• It is not square. The guideline requires "a square (1:1 aspect ratio)".
• It is in a format not on the list — SVG and WebP being the likely culprits.
• It is not on your home page. Google’s instructions are to add the link tag "to the header of your home page", in the form <link rel="icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">.
• You expected a different icon for a section of your site. "Google Search only supports one favicon per site, where a site is defined by the hostname." A subdomain can have its own; a folder cannot.
• Google cannot fetch it. "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 address keeps changing. "The favicon URL must be stable (don't change the URL frequently)."
• Google has not been back yet. "Remember that crawling can take anywhere from several days to several weeks, depending on how often our systems determine content needs to be refreshed." We measured how long that wait actually is on our own site in our post on when Google recrawls a page.

And one line to keep your expectations honest: "A favicon isn't guaranteed to appear in Google Search results, even if all guidelines are met."

We checked our own site, and it fails

On 23 September 2026, and again on the morning of 25 September when this was published, we read the icon tags on our own home page. Both times it declared the same two:

• <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/assets/logo.svg"> — an SVG, which is not on Google’s list.
• <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/og-image.png"> — a PNG, and apple-touch-icon is one of the link types Google says it reads, but the image is 1,200 by 630 pixels, so not square.

There is no /favicon.ico to fall back on either; that address returns an error on our site. So by the rules as written, neither icon we declare qualifies. What we have not done is test what Google actually shows next to our results, so we are not claiming more than the rules say.

Two things we should declare. We build websites for a living, on our own platform, beam.page, so a post telling you to check your site suits us. And beam.page’s own home page gets this right: it declares PNG icons at 48×48 and 192×192. It was our own company site that got it wrong. We are publishing that as we found it rather than fixing it quietly first.

How to fix a favicon for Google in five minutes

1. Make a square PNG. 96×96 or 192×192 is plenty (our suggestion; Google’s floor is 8×8 and its recommendation is larger than 48×48).
2. Put it somewhere it will stay. Same file name, same address, for the long term.
3. Link it from your home page. Most site builders have a “site icon” or “favicon” setting that writes the tag for you; if yours takes an SVG, give it a PNG as well.
4. Check nothing blocks it. If you have a robots.txt, make sure it does not block the icon or the home page.
5. Ask Google to look again. "You can request indexing of your site's home page by using the URL Inspection tool." Then wait: days to weeks, by Google’s own account.

What argues the other way

• A list of supported formats is not a list of banned ones. Google says what it supports; it does not say an SVG favicon will be ignored, and we have not tested it. If yours already shows in Google, leave it alone.
• This is not a ranking factor anyone has shown us. A favicon changes how your result looks, not where it sits. We have not seen Google say a favicon affects position, so we are not claiming it does.
• Your browser tab is a different question. An SVG favicon can be the right choice for the tab. The simplest fix is to offer both: keep the SVG and add a square PNG.
• We have an interest, as above. The rules are quoted and linked so you can check them without us.

Sources, and what we checked

• Google Search Central, Define a favicon to show in search results, last updated 28 August 2026, fetched raw on 23 September 2026 and again on 25 September 2026; the text was unchanged between the two.
• Google Search Central, documentation updates, entry for 28 August 2026, fetched raw the same day.
• The Internet Archive’s copy of the favicon page from 12 August 2026 (page then last updated 4 February 2026), compared sentence by sentence with the current page: one sentence differs.
• Wikipedia, Favicon: image file format support, the table the old Google page linked to, read on 23 September 2026.
• Our own home page and beam.page’s home page, icon tags read with curl on 23 and 25 September 2026; our apple-touch image measured at 1,200×630 both times.
• Every quotation above was tested automatically against the stripped source text before publication.