How to Check if a Website Has a Favicon (And Whether It Loads)

To check if a website has a favicon, read its home page for a <link rel="icon"> tag, then fetch the icon it points to. With no icon link, browsers ask for /favicon.ico at the site root, so that is the fallback to try. The favicon checker does both for up to 100 sites a run (500 after a free Google sign-in) and tells you whether each icon loads as a real image.

It reads public pages only. Each site gets at most five small fetches.

The by-hand way

1. Open the site, right-click the page and choose View Source. Search for rel="icon" or rel="shortcut icon". The href is the favicon.
2. Search for rel="apple-touch-icon". That is the icon iPhones use for home-screen bookmarks.
3. Paste the href into the address bar. If an image loads, the favicon works. If you get a 404 or a web page, it does not.
4. If there was no link tag, try yoursite.com/favicon.ico. Browsers do the same when a page declares nothing.

That is fine for one site. For a portfolio of client sites it is slow, and the sneaky failure is easy to miss by eye: a server that answers a missing icon with its HTML 404 page and a 200 status looks like it worked.

Step 1: paste the sites

Paste one site or a list, one per line. Up to 100 a run without an account, 500 after a free Google sign-in.

Step 2: run the check

Each home page is read for its icon links. Up to two declared favicons and one Apple touch icon are fetched. If none are declared, or none load, /favicon.ico and /apple-touch-icon.png are tried. The first bytes of each file tell the checker whether it is really ICO, PNG, GIF, JPEG, WebP or SVG, so a mislabelled file is caught.

Step 3: read each verdict

Verdict	What it means	What to do
Favicon and Apple icon	Both load as images	Nothing to fix
Favicon only	The browser icon works, the iOS one is missing	Add an Apple touch icon if the site gets bookmarked on iPhones
Broken favicon	An icon is declared or defaulted but does not load as an image	Fix the file or the path
No favicon	Nothing declared and no /favicon.ico	Add one
Unreachable	The home page did not answer	Check the site is up, then run it again

Each row shows the icon URL, how it was found, and the image format and pixel size. Download the CSV to hand the list to whoever runs the sites.

Why Google and browsers care

Google Search can show a site's favicon next to its results when the home page declares one with a link tag, the icon is square and at least 8x8 pixels (48x48 or larger is recommended), and Googlebot may crawl the page and the icon. Blocking the icon in robots.txt is a common reason it never shows. Our guide to checking robots.txt shows how to read those rules.

What this check cannot do

• It does not run JavaScript, so icons added by script or listed only in a web app manifest are not seen.
• It reads the first 256 KB of the home page and 64 KB of each icon.
• It does not judge the design, and it cannot say whether Google will show the icon.
• A site that blocks automated requests can answer 403 here and still load in a browser.
• The limit is 100 sites a run without an account and 500 signed in.

For other site-level checks across a list, see checking a sitemap for errors, checking whether a list of websites is online and reading a site's HTTP headers.

Check the addresses of the people who run these sites

A working favicon says nothing about whether the owner's email works. Upload your list on the verify page: the first 100 email checks are free with a Google sign-in, no card. Each address comes back valid, risky or invalid with a reason, and nothing is sent to anyone on the list. For larger or recurring lists, see bulk email verification, list cleaning and pricing.

Check your sites now

Paste them into the favicon checker.