Google Search results do not show our custom Favicon

Johan van den H · 4 hours ago

We have created a custom Favicon for our Employee Service Center which is public available through https://support.wur.nl
However this custom Favicon is not shown with search results generated with Google Search.
When you use another search engine the custom Favicon is shown correctly.

Google:
When searching for "WUR Support Portal" the first search result is https://support.wur.nl but the icon shown is de (default?) ServiceNow logo.

Microsoft Bing & Duckduckgo:
When searching for "WUR Support Portal" the first search result is https://support.wur.nl and the icon shown is our WUR logo (as designed).

Does anyone recognise this issue and has someone maybe solved it?

Naveen20 · 4 hours ago

This is a known issue where Google's favicon crawler doesn't pick up the custom favicon from ServiceNow portals. Here's what's likely happening and how to fix it:

Google has its own favicon indexing process (Googlebot-Image) that crawls favicons independently. It often caches older favicons aggressively and can take weeks or months to update. It also has specific technical requirements that ServiceNow portals sometimes don't meet out of the box.

Steps to resolve:

First, make sure your favicon is properly declared in the <head> of your portal's HTML. ServiceNow Service Portal sometimes serves the favicon in a way Google's crawler can't easily discover. Verify you have a standard <link rel="icon"> tag pointing to your custom icon, not just relying on the /favicon.ico root path.

Second, ensure your robots.txt isn't blocking Googlebot from accessing the favicon URL. ServiceNow instances sometimes restrict crawler access. Check that the path to your favicon asset (typically under /sys_attachment.do or similar) isn't disallowed.

Third, confirm the favicon is served at the root /favicon.ico path as well — Google prefers this location. You can set this up via a Scripted REST API or a Processor that redirects /favicon.ico to your actual favicon attachment.

Finally, once the above is in place, use Google Search Console → request re-indexing of https://support.wur.nl. You can also use the URL Inspection tool to see exactly what Google sees when it crawls your page. The favicon update can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks on Google's side.

Ensure your favicon is accessible at /favicon.ico, not blocked by robots.txt, and request re-indexing via Google Search Console.