I built a small landing page for a client and recently replaced the old favicon with the client's logo. The site is hosted on Vercel and was built with React and TypeScript. The new icon has been in place for more than two weeks, but Google Search still shows the old favicon. I requested indexing through Google Search Console twice and added a sitemap, but there has been no visible change. I've also tried cloning and redeploying the project. Is there anything else I can do to speed up the update, or is this simply a matter of waiting for Google to recrawl and process the new icon?
4 Answers
Also verify that the favicon meets Google’s requirements: use a supported format, make sure it’s accessible from the homepage, and provide an appropriate size. If those checks pass and the new icon is already visible directly on the site, there probably isn’t a technical fix left—Google’s favicon recrawl can simply be slow.
Favicons are aggressively cached by browsers and sometimes by delivery layers. Change the icon URL in the page markup to something like `favicon.ico?v=2`, or rename the file entirely, then redeploy. Have the client check in a private window or after clearing the browser cache. That should fix what they see in the browser, though it won’t force Google Search to update immediately.
Make sure the client isn’t judging the browser tab and Google results as if they were the same cache. A hard reload or incognito test checks the live website. The icon beside a Google result is controlled by Google’s separate crawl and processing cycle, which can take much longer than the site update itself.
Google Search and the browser are two separate issues. If the new favicon appears in the browser after a hard refresh or in a private window, then your site is serving it correctly. Google can take days or even several weeks to update the favicon shown beside a result, especially for a low-traffic site. Requesting indexing can help trigger a recrawl, but it doesn’t guarantee an immediate update.
That clears things up—the site is updated, but Google’s search result still has the old icon. I’ll explain that the remaining delay is on Google’s processing side.
I’ve run into the same issue before, and changing the URL query string was enough to make the new icon appear.