Google Search Central now names the exact favicon formats it will crawl: BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, and TIFF. The change swaps out a prior reference that pointed to an outside standards page, one Google says had “evolved over time and caused ambiguity” about what actually qualifies.
Google frames this as a clarification, not a policy shift, telling site owners the accepted list has not changed. That distinction matters for anyone diagnosing why a favicon is not surfacing: the documentation was the ambiguous part, not the crawler behavior.
SVG is conspicuously absent. Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable, whose founder Barry Schwartz first flagged the update, that SVG remains unsupported for search results, even as browsers and app icons increasingly treat it as standard.
Sites relying on an SVG favicon should ship a pixel-based fallback (ICO or PNG) now rather than after a future crawl shows the icon missing. Search Console still offers no dedicated favicon debugger, so confirming the fix means checking rendered results directly.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the documentation change.
