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Rule · Document head and metadata

Favicon eligible for Google Search

SEO-META-05AC1 Mechanism· w8gate: feature:favicon

Class
C1 Mechanism
Weight
8
Severity on fail
critical
Applies to
Google

Scope and evidence

Evaluated on home page of each in-scope hostname. The book marks this requirement ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENT, SEARCH-ENGINE-SPECIFIC, and the scanner treats it as a gate: feature:favicon rule: a failure makes the unit ineligible for the feature, and the report lists the feature's eligibility on its own line.

When no candidate passes, emit one finding per (candidate, failed condition), evaluating every check for every candidate rather than stopping at the first failure. Favicon candidates and their robots.txt files are fetched for the home page of every in-scope hostname, whatever origin the icon is served from. Eligibility is not display: "A favicon isn't guaranteed to appear in Google Search results, even if all guidelines are met." Google supports one favicon per hostname; subdirectory home pages are not supported. Google also asks that the favicon URL be stable; a single snapshot cannot test that, so the diff mode reports favicon URL changes between scans.

Fail and opportunity conditions

Each condition has a stable code and a reason template. The evaluator fills the placeholders from observed values only; no sentence in a report is generated. An opportunity condition fires when the documented practice is absent and nothing is broken by its absence; it counts in the score like a fail and is reported as something to add.

  • home_blocked

    {resource} is disallowed for {crawler} by {rule}. Google requires that Googlebot-Image can crawl the favicon file and Googlebot can crawl the home page.

  • no_icon_linkopportunity

    The home page of {origin} has no favicon link in its <head>. Google reads the favicon from a <link> tag in the header of the home page.

  • icon_not_ok

    The favicon {icon_url} returned {outcome}.

  • icon_blocked

    {resource} is disallowed for {crawler} by {rule}. Google requires that Googlebot-Image can crawl the favicon file and Googlebot can crawl the home page.

  • unsupported_format

    The favicon {icon_url} is {format}. Google lists BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF as supported favicon formats.

  • not_square

    The favicon {icon_url} is {width}×{height}. Google requires a square (1:1) favicon of at least 8x8px.

  • too_small

    The favicon {icon_url} is {width}×{height}. Google requires a square (1:1) favicon of at least 8x8px.

The documented fix

Add <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.png"> (or an ICO) to the home page head, pointing to a stable, crawlable, square raster image, ideally larger than 48×48.

Sources, quoted

These are the passages the rule rests on, stored once in the knowledge base and emitted exactly as written. A citation marked for specific conditions appears only on findings with those codes.