A redirect chain between your homepage and your favicon page can now cost you the favicon if any hop is blocked. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported Oct. 27 that Google revised its favicon documentation to spell out the crawl requirements.
The updated bullet says Googlebot must crawl the home page and follow redirects from it to the page that specifies the favicon. Googlebot-Image must separately be able to fetch the favicon file itself. Google adds that none of these URLs may be disallowed in a robots.txt file or restricted any other way.
The previous wording covered only the favicon file and the home page, with no mention of redirects. Schwartz described the edit as a clarification, not a policy change, and Google has not announced any new behavior.
Sites that redirect visitors from the root domain to a language folder or a different host are the likely cases to check. Test the full path from homepage to favicon file against your robots.txt rules, including any redirect targets.
Search Engine Roundtable, Oct. 27, 2026, reporting Google’s favicon documentation update.
