Get a website favicon from its URL

The short answer

A favicon is the small icon a website declares for browser tabs, bookmarks, history lists and home-screen shortcuts. To get one from a site's address, open the page and read the icon declarations in its HTML head. These are link elements whose rel value is "icon", "shortcut icon" or "apple-touch-icon", plus any icons listed in a linked web app manifest. Follow the file reference in each declaration to get the image. If a page declares no icon, browsers conventionally request a file named favicon.ico from the root of the site, so that location is the usual fallback.

What you retrieve is the site's tab icon. It is not necessarily its logo. Favicons are often simplified marks, single letters or cropped symbols designed to read at very small sizes. They are frequently raster images rather than editable vector artwork.

Steps to locate the favicon files

• 1. Load the page in a desktop browser and view the page source, or open the developer tools and inspect the head element.
• 2. Search the source for "icon" to find every icon-related link element. Many sites declare several files for different sizes and devices.
• 3. Note each file reference and any size or type attributes. These hint at the format, but they do not confirm it.
• 4. Check for a manifest link. The manifest file usually lists additional icons at larger sizes.
• 5. If nothing is declared, try the conventional favicon.ico file at the site root.
• 6. Alternatively, use the network panel in the developer tools. Reload the page and filter the requests by image type to see which icon files the browser actually fetched.

A typical set of declarations looks like the snippet below. The file references are shown as placeholders. Real sites vary widely in which of these they include.

<head>
  <link rel="icon" href="..." type="image/svg+xml">
  <link rel="icon" href="..." sizes="32x32" type="image/png">
  <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="...">
  <link rel="manifest" href="...">
</head>

Third-party favicon lookup tools can also return an icon when you enter an address. They typically fetch, resize or convert the file for you. As a result, the image you receive may be a rasterized copy rather than the original file the site serves. If you need the best available source, retrieve the declared files directly.

What formats to expect, and which are vector

Format | Typical role | Vector or raster

ICO | Legacy favicon, often at the site root | Raster container that can hold several pixel sizes

PNG | Sized tab icons, touch icons, manifest icons | Raster

SVG | Scalable tab icon in browsers that support it | Can contain vector paths, but may also wrap an embedded raster image

The SVG row is the one that matters for vector work. You cannot tell from the extension alone that an SVG contains editable vector paths. Open the file in a text editor or a vector application. Path and shape elements indicate true vector geometry. An image element carrying embedded bitmap data means the file is a raster picture inside an SVG wrapper. Scaling such a file up will blur it, just as with a PNG. Some SVG favicons also include style rules, such as switching colors for dark mode, so the artwork may look different when edited outside a browser.

Enlarging a small ICO or PNG favicon will not produce usable logo artwork. Tracing it into vector paths creates a new approximation, not the original design file. For anything beyond on-screen reference, the brand's official logo files are the appropriate source, typically from a press kit or brand guidelines.

Downloading versus using the artwork

Being able to download a favicon does not grant rights to it. Showing a site's icon next to a link to that site, as bookmark managers and link previews do, is a different matter from modifying the artwork, reusing its letterforms or presenting the mark in your own branding. Favicons frequently contain trademarked symbols and sometimes custom or licensed type. Any use beyond simple identification of the site should be checked against the owner's brand guidelines or cleared with the owner directly.

Gaps in this overview

No evidence was supplied about a particular website, lookup tool or service. This article therefore describes general, verifiable web conventions. It does not name or evaluate specific tools, and it does not report test results, supported sizes or performance figures. Which files any given site actually serves can only be confirmed by inspecting that site.