Site icon missing - Check Explained

PassA site icon is declared.

InfoNo icon link is declared in the HTML.

The fix, in one snippet

Example to adapt A couple of sizes

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/icon-192.png" sizes="192x192">

Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.

The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.

What we test

We look for a <link rel="icon"> declaration, including the shortcut icon and apple-touch-icon variants, and report pages with none. A file at /favicon.ico with no link element still works in browsers, so this check is informational.

Why it matters

Google shows a site icon beside results on mobile, and its documentation requires the icon to be declared in the HTML with a rel="icon" link in order to be eligible. A file sitting at the conventional path is enough for a browser tab but not for the search result.

The icon is also the only branding present in a tab strip, a bookmark bar or a history list, which is where returning visitors find you. A reader with twenty tabs open identifies yours by a sixteen-pixel square or not at all.

A missing icon has one further cost: browsers still request /favicon.ico, so an absent file produces a 404 on every page load, which clutters the log you would otherwise use to find real errors.

How to fix it

Declare the icon explicitly and provide a couple of sizes:

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/icon-192.png" sizes="192x192">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">

Google's requirements for the search icon are specific: a square multiple of 48 pixels, a stable URL that does not change on every deploy, crawlable (not blocked in robots.txt), and the same icon across the site. Keep it simple enough to read at 16 pixels.

Where this fits

Site icon missing is check 3 of 4 that the seo & site health audit runs under structured data and social, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.

Fix this one first

Above it in the same category sits Open Graph tags missing (low), where open Graph tags decide how a link looks when it is shared. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.

What fixing this still leaves open

Site icon missing closes one route in. The next one down is Twitter card missing, where a twitter:card tag selects the card format on X.

Found in the same scan

The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.

Prompt for an AI Hand this check to an assistant Sign in to copy it

The first few lines

You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.

Finding: Site icon missing (info severity)
Scanner check id: seo-favicon

18 more lines, including the evidence and the exact fix

The rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.

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