A website favicon is the small square icon in a browser tab, a bookmark, and next to your site's name in Google's results. We checked it on 43 Sacramento-area brokerage websites on October 15, 2026. 31 show their own mark. The other 12 show nothing at all, a blank square, a picture that is not theirs, or the logo of the company that built or hosts the site.
It is the smallest piece of branding a brokerage owns, and one of the most seen. Someone with ten tabs open finds you by it. Google uses it to set your result apart from the one above it. And it takes about fifteen minutes to get right.
The sample is the same 43 brokerages we timed on a phone, read for their Google site name and checked for link previews. The method is at the end, and no firm is named.
What we found on 43 brokerage sites
We requested each homepage once, read every icon it names, and looked at every icon file by eye.
The brokerage's own mark
No icon at all
The website builder's or web host's logo
A picture that is not theirs
A blank square
| What the site's icon is | Sites |
|---|---|
| The brokerage's own mark | 31 |
| No icon at all | 5 |
| The website builder's or web host's logo | 4 |
| A picture that is not theirs | 2 |
| A blank square | 1 |
The four borrowed logos are worth a closer look, because none of them was a choice:
- A grey cube. Squarespace's help page says "All Squarespace sites start with our default cube favicon." The site never replaced it.
- The WordPress logo. A WordPress site with no site icon set answers requests for
/favicon.icowith a WordPress logo; that has been in WordPress itself since version 5.4. This one did name an icon, but the link pointed at another website's theme files, which did not load. - The Framer logo. A site built on Framer whose icon is Framer's own mark.
- A cartoon alligator, the mascot of the company hosting the site, sitting in the site's
/favicon.ico.
The two pictures that are not theirs are a stock photo of a map pin on a phone and a plain outline of a house. Neither says which brokerage you are looking at. The blank one is a 16 pixel square of white, nearly transparent pixels.
What Google asks for
Google's page on favicons in search results (updated August 28, 2026) is short. To be eligible:
- Name it on your homepage. "Add a
<link>tag to the header of your home page." Google readsicon,shortcut icon,apple-touch-iconandapple-touch-icon-precomposed. - Make it square. "Your favicon must be a square (1:1 aspect ratio) that's at least 8x8px." Google recommends "larger than 48x48px so that it looks good on various surfaces."
- Use a format Google lists: "BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, and TIFF." SVG is not on the list.
- Let Google fetch it. Googlebot must be able to crawl the homepage and Googlebot-Image the icon file.
- Make it yours. Google asks that the favicon be "visually representative of your website's brand."
Google also says plainly that "A favicon isn't guaranteed to appear in Google Search results, even if all guidelines are met," and that a change can take "several days to several weeks" to show.
Measured against that list, 26 of the 43 homepages follow the setup and 17 do not:
Homepage names a square icon in a listed format, and it loads
No working icon tag on the homepage
The tag points to an icon that is not square
The only icon is an SVG
| Google's setup | Sites |
|---|---|
| Homepage names a square icon in a listed format, and it loads | 26 |
| No working icon tag on the homepage | 10 |
| The tag points to an icon that is not square | 6 |
| The only icon is an SVG | 1 |
Of the 10 with no working tag, 5 still have a file at /favicon.ico, the old fallback address. Browsers may look there when a page names no icon, so the tab can still show something: the firm's own mark on three of them, and on the other two the WordPress logo and the alligator. But Google's instructions ask for the tag, so those five skip the one step Google spells out.
Put the two tables together and 21 of 43 brokerages have their own mark and follow Google's setup. That is under half.
Five ways a website favicon goes wrong
- Never set. The builder's default stays, or nothing shows at all. Eight of the twelve problem sites are this.
- The whole logo, shrunk. 9 of the 31 own marks are a full logo with the firm's name squeezed in. At 16 pixels in a tab, the words become grey fuzz and the symbol gets lost with them.
- Not square. Six sites point at an icon that is not square, the widest about three and a half times wider than it is tall. Google's rule is 1:1.
- Hosted somewhere that is not yours. One icon lived on another site's server and stopped loading. Google allows an icon on a CDN, but it has to keep working, and Google asks that its address stay "stable".
- Far too big. One brokerage's icon is a 5,082 by 4,280 pixel image of 590 KB, for a picture shown at 16 pixels. Squarespace caps favicon uploads at 100 KB; a good favicon file is a few kilobytes.
Our own site
We ran the same check on www.flarebuilt.com. Our homepage names a favicon (the ember flame on a black square), in 16, 32 and 48 pixel sizes, plus a 180 pixel icon for iPhones, all square. The gap, which we would rather name than leave out: the icons a browser tab uses top out at 48 pixels, and Google recommends larger than that. We have 192 and 512 pixel versions sitting on our server that our homepage does not name. Google accepts the 180 pixel iPhone icon, so we are eligible, but that is a fix on our own list.
Fix yours in fifteen minutes
- Look at your own tab. Open your homepage with other tabs beside it. If you see a cube, a W, a globe or a smudge, keep going.
- Pick the symbol, not the whole logo. The mark from your logo, or your initials, with no tagline.
- Make a square PNG at 192 by 192 pixels on a plain background, and keep it under 100 KB. Most are under 10 KB.
- Upload it where your builder asks. Squarespace has a Favicon panel. Wix puts it under Website settings and needs a Premium plan with a connected domain, per its help page. WordPress calls it the Site Icon. Framer keeps it in Site Settings.
- Check the homepage names it. Right-click the page, view source, and search for
icon. You should find a<link rel="icon"line pointing at your file. - Ask Google to look again. In Search Console, inspect your homepage and request indexing. Then give it a few weeks.
What we would build
A brokerage site with its icon set made from the logo at every size Google, browsers and phones ask for, named on every page, served from your own domain, and checked by eye at 16 pixels before launch. A launch site starts at $900 and is live in 48 hours, and a full brokerage site starts at $4,500 and is live in about a week, with Flare Care keeping it current for the months after.
If you want this check run on your site, tell us about your brokerage, or build your package in about two minutes.
How we checked
The sites are every live website from our two earlier Sacramento-area audits: brokerage corporations licensed in Sacramento County since 2024 (residential) and Sacramento-region corporations with Commercial or CRE in their licensed name (commercial), the same 43 as our speed, site name, security and link preview checks.
On October 15, 2026 we requested each homepage once, as an ordinary desktop browser, and read every icon link in it. We requested each icon it named once, plus /favicon.ico, measured them, and looked at every one by eye. Where our script found no icon or something odd, we opened the page in a real browser and read the icons it had after loading: that found two icons the script had missed, one added by the page's own code and one placed outside the page's header. One site's secure address did not load (its certificate is not trusted), so we read it over its plain address. Nothing else was requested.
What it cannot see: we did not photograph each browser's tab or Google's results, so the post describes the files each homepage hands out, measured against what Google documents. Whether a firm's own mark is "a whole logo, shrunk" is our judgment by eye. Icons change, and browsers keep old ones for a while, so this is a snapshot of one day.