Google fixes a favicon bug and a Search Console crawl stats gap

Two unrelated Google problems closed out on the same weekend. Google fixed a bug that had been replacing real site favicons with a default globe icon in search results, and separately patched a gap in the Search Console Crawl Stats report, which was fixed around 5pm ET on Sunday, 23 August 2026.

What was the favicon bug?#

For about a week, Google search results showed the default globe icon instead of the favicon a site had defined, for many sites. The favicon is the small icon shown beside a result, and it is part of how a searcher recognizes a brand before clicking.

Google’s Rajan Patel addressed it at 11am ET on Saturday, 22 August, saying it was “not fixed yet, but should be in the next 12 hours or so.” By the time Search Engine Roundtable published on the Sunday evening, it reported both bugs as mostly, if not fully, resolved.

What was the crawl stats gap?#

Separately, the Crawl Stats report in Search Console was missing about two days of data starting around 14 to 15 August 2026. That fix landed on Sunday, 23 August, at around 5pm ET.

Google’s Crawl Stats help page describes the report as statistics about Google’s crawling history on your site: how many requests were made and when, what your server responded and any availability issues. It is only available for a root-level property, a Domain property or a URL-prefix property at the root, and Google says it is aimed at advanced users; a site with fewer than a thousand pages should not need it. Google also notes the report counts most crawl requests but some might not be counted, so small differences from your server logs are expected even without a bug.

What should you check now?#

If your favicon is still a globe after the fix, the cause is more likely on your side. Google’s favicon guidelines say the icon must be square, at least 8x8px, with larger than 48x48px recommended. Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl the favicon file and Googlebot must be able to crawl the home page, and the favicon URL should stay stable. A quick pass through our robots.txt tester will show whether either path is blocked. Google also says crawling can take from several days to several weeks, so a corrected favicon will not appear instantly.

For Crawl Stats, look at 14 to 15 August again: the gap should now be filled. If the missing days led you to suspect a crawl drop, recheck that conclusion against the restored data.

Why we care#

Nothing here points to a ranking or indexing problem; both were reporting and display bugs, not signals that a site did something wrong. But a missing favicon can cost click-through in a results page where the icon is part of how a user recognizes a brand, and a data gap in Crawl Stats can send someone chasing a crawl-budget problem that was never real. If either looked wrong to you in the affected window, it was very likely Google’s bug, not your site’s.