In October 2026 Google clarified that Googlebot has to follow every redirect from the home page to the page that declares the favicon. A broken step is enough for the gray globe to show up. Plus the formats and the one-icon-per-hostname rule.
On October 27, 2026, Google rewrote one line of its favicon documentation. Crawling the home page is no longer enough: Googlebot has to get through every redirect that leaves it, all the way to whichever page declares the icon, and no URL along that path can be blocked. If your client's home page sends visitors somewhere else before showing anything, that is usually where the gray globe replacing the logo comes from. Google called it a clarification, and it never made the documentation changelog.
Because Google looks for the icon in one place only: the home page of the hostname. The crawler opens the root, goes wherever it is sent and reads the link tag in the header of the page where it lands. If any link in that chain breaks, the tag is never read and the result shows the generic icon.
A few site setups break the chain often:
None of these is rare on agency client sites. The first one, in particular, shows up on almost every store that sells to more than one country.
The redirect is the news, but it is far from the only condition. According to Google's documentation, checked on November 2, 2026:
Notice what is missing from that format list: SVG. Plenty of new sites declare only a vector icon, which looks sharp at any size and works fine in the browser. In Search, going by the published list, that file is not guaranteed to be accepted. A second tag pointing to a square PNG of 48x48 or larger fixes it, and the SVG can stay where it is.
Google accepts one icon per hostname. A subdomain counts as its own hostname, so shop.client.com can have its own. A subfolder cannot: client.com/es/ inherits the home page icon. If you want a different icon per country or brand, you need a subdomain.
By the same rule, www.client.com and client.com are different hostnames. When the bare domain redirects to the www version, the chain Google has to follow starts one step earlier, and the http to https redirect counts too. Every hop is one more place where a firewall rule, an old robots.txt or an interstitial screen can stop the crawler.
This ties back to the redirect. On a site that sends the root to a language folder, the tag that counts is the one on the page where the chain ends for the crawler. Google itself says Googlebot seems to crawl from US-based IPs. If each language version declares a different file, the icon in results will likely be the one an American visitor would get.
Anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, according to Google, because the home page has to be crawled and processed again. Requesting indexing of the home page in Search Console's URL Inspection tool moves it up the queue. Even with everything right, Google does not promise to show the favicon: following the rules is a requirement, not a guarantee.
In practice, that changes the conversation with the client. An icon swapped on Friday has no reason to be in results by Monday, and chasing it sooner just creates tickets.
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