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Google broke favicons in Search: what to do
Publication date: 22.08.2026
If a grey globe has replaced your icon in Google results, it is not your fault. The favicon glitch started early in the week, complaints spiked by midweek, and on Friday Google officially confirmed the problem is on its side.
"It's an issue on our end. We identified the issue and we're addressing it as quickly as we can," wrote Rajan Patel, Google's VP of Engineering for Search, on X. The confirmation was reported by Search Engine Land. Some sites have already had their icons restored — Backlinko among them — while others, including LinkedIn, still show the default globe. The bug has been running for nearly a week and it is not limited to a handful of domains.
It only looks like a cosmetic detail. The favicon is practically the only splash of colour in a mobile snippet: it makes a result recognisable before anyone finishes reading the title. A week of grey globes can realistically dent CTR — especially on branded queries and in niches where you sit next to marketplaces in the results.
What to do now:
- Do not swap favicon.ico or rearrange tags in <head> — there is nothing to fix on your side;
- Check your snippets on mobile and desktop and note the date the icon disappeared;
- Compare this week's CTR in Search Console with the previous one so the dip is not later blamed on an algorithm;
- If the icon does not return after the fix, confirm the file returns 200, is not blocked in robots.txt and is reachable by Googlebot;
- Flag the outage as a separate line in client reports: the August spam update is rolling out in parallel and the two dips are easy to confuse.
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