1 Starting from an inconspicuous anomaly
I believe that for many personal bloggers, their website not displaying the favicon icon in Bing search results should be a fairly “familiar” issue. You don't even need to deliberately research it; just search for related keywords in Google, and you can see a whole bunch of similar discussions, tutorials, and even various “solutions”:
Precisely because this problem is so long-standing, people have instead come to take it somewhat “for granted”—seemingly defaulting to the assumption that it is just a stubborn minor issue: it would be great if it could be resolved, but if not, so be it.
In terms of actual impact, it is indeed not a big issue; it won't affect indexing, nor will it directly affect rankings. But from a visual standpoint, it always feels a bit lacking: in the same page of search results, other people's sites have clear icons, while yours is just a default gray globe icon placeholder, which more or less gives people a feeling of being “not very professional” or “a bit low”:
What's more interesting is that this issue also carries a bit of a “platform difference” flavor. Many times, for the same website, the favicon in Google is completely normal, but once switched to Bing, it directly “disappears”. For example, taking the website of blogger “Benben”, who inspired me to start blogging, as an example, in Google's search results, everything looks completely normal:
But the same site, in Bing, turns into another state—the icon is gone, leaving only a default Bing gray globe icon:
If it were just an isolated case, it would actually be easy to understand, but when you observe a bit more, you will find that this is not an occasional phenomenon, but a fairly common situation. I actually had the same issue myself before, where my website had no favicon in Bing for a long time. However, one day recently, after a long time, I searched for my blog address in Bing, and found that the icon had “quietly appeared” at some unknown point:
The whole process did not involve any targeted optimization, nor did I deliberately try to “fix” this issue; it just appeared naturally like that. This, instead, made me find it a bit interesting—if it is neither a simple configuration issue nor a deterministic “fixing process”, then there is a high probability that it is not a purely technical reason behind it, and thus this article was born.
This time, I don't plan to write it as one of those tutorials that “teaches you how to solve the favicon not displaying” issue, but instead want to take a different perspective, combining my own observations and some reproducible phenomena, to seriously break it down:What logic on earth does Bing base its decision on whether to display a favicon for a website?
Once you figure out this issue, you will find that this matter might not be an “icon display issue”, but rather closer to—How Bing judges whether your website “looks like a website that deserves to be taken seriously”.
2 Those seemingly reasonable explanations
Before actually thinking about this issue, I, like most people, subconsciously went looking for “ready-made answers”. After all, this type of issue is so common—just search randomly in a search engine, and you can see all kinds of “experience summaries” and “solutions”. After reading a lot of them, you will find that these claims can be roughly categorized into several types, and each type sounds quite reasonable.
For example, some people will say that this isa matter of time—for a new site that has just gone online, Bing has not yet fully recognized your website structure, so naturally it won't display the favicon. Once it has been indexed for a long enough time, everything will “automatically return to normal”; others attribute the reason tocontent scale—too few articles or too low an update frequency will lead to the search engine “not paying enough attention” to the site; if we go a bit further in the “SEO direction”, some people will also link it toauthority, external links, and site ratingsand other factors, believing that the favicon will only appear after the website reaches a certain “threshold”~~:
There is also another more “technical” explanation that points the issue to specific configurations: for example, the favicon.ico path is non-standard, not written correctly, or CDN / caching causes Bing to fail to crawl, etc.:
The issue with these explanations is that—Looked at individually, each one is quite reasonable, but when placed in a real-world environment, they are hard to reconcile. At first, I actually tried to understand this phenomenon from these angles, and even once felt that “maybe that's just how it is”. But when I expanded my scope of observation slightly and compared different websites and different search results together, I quickly found that these explanations began to fall apart one by one. It was also from this point that I realized: this issue might not be a simple matter of “poor configuration” or “insufficient conditions”.
Taking my blog as an example, we can apply these common claims one by one to see. First, from the perspective of “time”, my blog has been running for nearly 3 years, which satisfies the claim of “existing for a relatively long time”:
But if we continue to look down, we will find that the situation begins to become inconsistent. In Bing's Webmaster Tools, the total discovered URLs of my website is about 606 个：
while the actual number of indexed pages is even smaller. Compared to the common threshold of “indexing more than 10,000 items”, this can be said to becompletely on a different scaleLooking at the external links, since I have hardly done any active promotion and rarely participate in link exchanges, my usual visitor sources come almost entirely from search engines:
This means that the point of “having relatively many backlinks (external links)” is also not met. As for page views, ranging from a few hundred on low days to at most around 1,000 on high days, this level can hardly be said to meet the standard of “very high click-through rate and click volume”.
In other words, if we look at these conditions together:
- ✔ Met: Existing for a relatively long time
- ❌ Not met: Index volume
- ❌ Not met: External link scale
- ❌ Not met: Traffic scale
then I actually only meetone of the conditions, but the issue is—under such circumstances, my website still displays the favicon normally.
This creates a very direct contradiction: if the statement “satisfying at least two conditions” holds true, then my site obviously should not have a favicon, but the reality is quite the opposite. In other words, this so-called “threshold model” does not hold true, at least in the real-world case of my blog.
As for the other type of explanation based on “technical reasons”, such as: non-standard favicon.ico paths; incorrect syntax; CDN/caching causing Bing crawl failures, etc. These explanations do hold true in certain scenarios, but when applied to this issue, there is also an obvious problem:If this were a technical reason, its behavior should be consistent rather than selective——that is to say, either all search engines fail to retrieve the favicon, or they can all display it normally.
But the reality is that for many personal bloggers (such as “Benben” mentioned in Chapter 1), everything is completely normal in Google, and the “not displaying” issue only occurs in Bing. As we all know, Google is extremely strict regarding page specifications and resource parsing. If a site can display its favicon normally in Google, then from a technical standpoint, it is already “qualified” in its own right.
Because of this, the essence of the problem is no longer “whether it can be displayed”, but—under the premise of already having the capability to display, whether Bing chooses to display it.
Then, a more critical question arises:On what basis is Bing making this choice of “whether to display”?
3 “Trusted sites” in the eyes of Bing”
1 Overview: How do we understand this issue when rules do not exist?
Since the question has shifted from “whether it is displayed” to “whether it is chosen to be displayed”, the next more critical question is:On what basis is Bing making this judgment of “whether to display”?
If this choice is not random, there must be a set of judgment logic behind it. It's just that this logic has not been explicitly written down. At first, I also tried a more direct approach—searching to see if Bing had officially provided any relevant explanations. But the actual situation is:Almost no clear documentation or rules regarding the conditions for displaying favicons can be found. This also means that it is very difficult for us to get an answer directly by “looking up information”.
In this case, instead of trying to find a “standard” that does not exist or is difficult to confirm, it is better to change our way of thinking:Treat this problem as a analysis of a typical “black-box system”.
That is to say, we no longer try to know “what the rules themselves are”, but rather approach this judgment mechanism by observing the relationship between inputs and outputs:
- Input: Various signals of a website (structure, content, traffic, etc.)
- Output: Whether to display in search results as a “complete site” (including the favicon)
But before truly analyzing these “input signals”, there is a more fundamental question that needs to be clarified first:How does the search engine itself identify “a site” from a bunch of independent pages? Because only when a website has been understood as a “site” can the subsequent judgment on “whether to display it in its complete form” (such as whether to include a favicon) have a premise to exist.
Because of this, next we need to solve the first problem first:How search engines reconstruct a “site” step-by-step from “pages”.
2 From “page” to “site”: How search engines understand a website
Before attempting to infer Bing's judgment logic, we need to return to a more fundamental question:How do search engines “understand a website”? From a user's perspective, a website is a natural whole: it has a clear name, a unified style, and clear structural boundaries. But for search engines, things are not so intuitive. Because the way search engines work determines that the first thing they encounter is never a “website”, but individual, independent pages.
Whether actively crawled by spiders or passively discovered through external links, what search engines obtain is always specific URLs. And the so-called “website” is actually a structure gradually “reconstructed” by search engines after classifying and organizing these pages in subsequent processing.
In other words:“A ”site" does not naturally exist in search engines; rather, it is recognized by them step-by-step. This point seems basic, but it directly determines a key question:Whether search engines have the ability to understand and display these pages as a “site”.
Once this is understood, many seemingly scattered phenomena can actually be connected—for search engines, what they really need to solve is not just “whether this page is of high quality”, but a more fundamental question: Can these pages be considered as belonging to the same whole? Does this whole have a clear structure? Is it stable and clear enough to be understood as an “independent site”?
That is to say, beyond “page quality”, there is a more fundamental judgment process:Site Identification. And this identification process does not rely on a single condition, but is completed step-by-step based on a set of comprehensive signals.
For example, whether there is a clear and stable structural relationship between pages—whether navigation, categories, and internal links can form a hierarchical structure rather than being isolated from each other; whether there is sufficient differentiation between different pages—whether titles and content can be clearly distinguished rather than being a large number of templated, repetitive combinations; whether the organization of URLs is consistent and readable, and whether it can reflect the hierarchical relationship between pages.
In addition, whether the site has a clear “identity” is equally important. For example, whether there is a stable site name, whether unified identification information continuously appears in titles or pages, and whether the overall style is consistent—all of these affect whether search engines can “merge” these pages into the same site, rather than a loose collection of content.
In essence, these signals are not special rules of a specific search engine, but basic information that almost all search engines rely on when processing web pages. Whether it is Google, or Microsoft 's Bing, there will be no essential difference on this point.
From this perspective, the significance of these signals is actually not just “optimizing page quality”, but helping search engines complete a more fundamental task:Confirming whether these pages can be merged into a “site” with a clear structure and defined boundaries. Only when this holds true can search engines organize and display these contents in the form of a “site” in the results.
On this basis, if we look back at the favicon issue, we will find a very natural corollary:If a site itself is not clearly recognized as a “site”, then it will be difficult for it to be fully displayed in the form of a “site”. And the favicon in Bing search results is precisely a part of this “site-level display”—it is not an attribute of a certain page, but rather:A display element that can only possibly appear as a byproduct once “site identification” is established.
In other words, in Bing search results,whether a site's favicon can be displayed depends first and foremost not on the icon itself, but on whether this site is already “treated as a site” by Bing.
A direct manifestation of site identification: sitelinks
To understand the process of “site identification” more intuitively, we can look at a very typical external manifestation—sitelinks.
Once a site is successfully identified, search engines often go a step further and present it in a more “structured” way. The most typical manifestation of this is the so-called sitelinks (site links)—displaying multiple important page entry points from the same site below the main result. This form of presentation essentially means that the search engine no longer treats these pages as isolated results, but has recognized that they belong to the same clearly structured site.
Because of this, sitelinks can often serve as a relatively intuitive reference signal:Only when a site's structure, hierarchy, and identity are clear enough does a search engine have the ability and reason to display it in the form of a “site”, taking my blog as an example, in Bing's search results, the sitelinks for the domestic and international versions are as follows:
However, forming scientific and aesthetically pleasing sitelinks is not an easy task: it is not a result triggered simply by a single factor, but often requires a whole set of long-term, stable site structures and content signals working together.
Because of this, the appearance of sitelinks is often not the result of an “optimization trick,” but rather like a natural feedback—only when a site is clear enough in its structure, content, and identity will search engines choose to display it in the form of a “site.”
If a site is already able to stably generate sitelinks, it at least shows that:in the eyes of search engines, it already possesses a very clear structure and distinct site boundaries.
It needs to be emphasized that sitelinks are not a prerequisite for the appearance of a favicon, nor is there a direct triggering relationship between the two. The more important significance of introducing sitelinks here is: serving as an observable signal to demonstrate that a site has been recognized by search engines as a “clearly structured whole,” thereby ruling out the possibility of “insufficient basic conditions.”
3 favicon: A delayed “site signal”
In the previous section, starting from the basic working method of search engines, we have explained one thing:as long as a site has a clear structure, stable content, and explicit identity signals, search engines have the ability to recognize it as a “complete site.”
In other words, from the perspective of “site identification,” whether a website is understood as a “site” actually leaves a trace. But the problem is—even if these conditions are met, the favicon in Bing search results may still not appear.
This creates a very critical contradiction: on the one hand, Bing is already able to identify this site; on the other hand, it does not display a “site identifier” like a favicon in the search results. Taking my blog as an example, less than 2 years after the site was built, a structured display of sitelinks similar to the current one had already appeared, but the favicon only appeared in the last two months. If the display of a favicon depended solely on “whether it is recognized as a site,” then these two outcomes should not have occurred at the same time. In other words, relying solely on the logic of “site identification” can no longer explain this phenomenon.
Under these circumstances, a more reasonable inference is:besides “site identification,” Bing likely has another independent judgment mechanism to decide “whether to display.” From this perspective, the issue of the favicon is actually no longer a “technical problem,” nor is it a question of “whether basic conditions are met,” but rather:a question of whether to choose to display it, given that the capability to display it already exists.
If we abstract this process further, we can get a clearer structure: the entire judgment process is very likely not completed all at once, but is divided into two relatively independent stages. The first stage is a basic process that all search engines go through: identifying the “site” through signals such as page structure, content differences, and link relationships. The second stage, built upon this foundation, is to make a further choice regarding the presentation format: whether to present the results in the form of a “complete site,” and whether to accompany it with visual identifiers like a favicon.
In most cases, these two stages often occur consecutively, making it easy to mistake them for “the same judgment.” However, from actual observations, there seems to be a certain degree of “decoupling” between the two in Bing. It is precisely because of this that such a situation arises:The site has already been recognized, but the favicon is still not displayed.
Next, a more critical question naturally emerges:Since it already possesses the “ability to display,” on what basis is Bing deciding “whether to display” the favicon?
4 Key factors affecting favicon display
If the previous section addressed “whether a second level of judgment exists,” then this section aims to answer: what exactly are these judgments based on? In the absence of official explanations, this question is difficult to answer directly through “rule documentation.” However, looking at it from another perspective, this judgment process is bound not to be completely random. In other words:If there is indeed a “second level of judgment” for displaying the favicon, it must rely on a set of signals that can be perceived by search engines.
And we don't need to guess these signals—to some extent, Bing has already directly displayed some of “the things it cares about” through its Webmaster Tools.
For example, in Bing's Webmaster Tools, you can see a very typical type of prompt message:
Taken individually, these prompts seem to be just common “page optimization suggestions,” such as missing ALT attributes for images, duplicate titles, descriptions that are too short, non-standard use of structural tags, and so on.
But if we look at these issues together, we will find a more interesting phenomenon:They almost all point to the same core issue—whether the page is “clear, distinguishable, and easy to understand.”
For example, duplicate titles make different pages difficult to distinguish semantically; descriptions that are too short weaken the ability to express the page's theme; and chaotic structural tags (such as multiple H1s or missing H1s) make the page's hierarchical relationships unclear.
In other words, these so-called “issues” do not essentially just affect the quality of a single page, but are affecting a higher-level judgment:Whether this site is sufficiently “clear” and “understandable.”
If we put this back into the “two-stage model” mentioned earlier, we will find a very reasonable explanation: in the first stage, these pages are already sufficient for search engines to complete “site recognition”; but in the second stage, when Bing needs to decide “whether to display in the form of a complete site,” these detailed issues are very likely to become factors influencing the judgment.
That is to say:Even if the site has been recognized, if there are obvious problems in aspects such as “structural clarity” and “content distinctiveness,” Bing may choose not to display the favicon for the time being.
Writing up to this point, I suddenly remembered something I did over the past two months: I modified the titles of all my articles, removing the original “Home Data Center Series,” “Docker Series,” “Tips and Tricks Series,” etc. (Previously, I was used to writing article categories as "XX Series" at the beginning of article titles, because I felt this allowed readers to see at a glance which category the article belonged to).
This incident made me instantly and basically certain that—This is precisely the main reason why Bing did not display my favicon beforePreviously, I had been seeing the error “too many page titles are identical” in Webmaster Tools, though at that time the number was far more than the current 238.
Actually, I once suspected that Bing itself has a certain bias when judging the issue of “identical titles.” Taking my currently still existing error as an example, after clicking to view, I found that the so-called “duplicate titles” actually referred to the Chinese and English version pages on my site:
But from the actual situation, the titles of these two types of pages are completely different:
In other words,Under the current page state, these determinations of “duplicate titles” actually no longer hold true.
This brings about a noteworthy phenomenon: Bing's reports of this kind are very likely not generated based on real-time data, but still rely on historical crawls or analysis results that have not yet been updated. In other words, even if the site has completed structural or content optimizations, these changes may not be immediately reflected in Webmaster Tools.
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that in some cases, Bing has a certain simplification strategy in its determination logic for multi-language pages, leading to similar “false positives.” But regardless of the specific reason, this phenomenon at least illustrates one point:The prompts in Webmaster Tools are not always fully synchronized with the current site status.
And this also leads to a more interesting question: in similar scenarios, why did other search engines (such as Google) not produce the same judgment results?
The duplicate title rate is too high, causing Bing to choose not to display the favicon temporarily when determining whether the site has full display capabilities (though I have to complain here, Google has no problem with it, why is Bing being so picky? It was precisely because I thought this way before that I didn't bother with Bing~).
After I made uniform adjustments to all article titles, the number of such errors dropped significantly, and the distinctiveness between pages increased accordingly. More importantly, shortly after this, when I searched for my blog in Bing again, the favicon had already started to display normally.
Although a “causal relationship” cannot be simply and absolutely proven between the two, from the chronological order and the resulting changes, this correlation is very strong. In other words,Once the site improved in the key dimension of “content distinctiveness,” Bing very likely re-evaluated the site's display eligibility, thereby allowing the display of the favicon.
My own experience illustrates this well:Even if the site has been fully recognized, Bing will still make additional judgments on the display of the favicon based on internal site structure and content signals.
Of course, in my case, the main factor affecting the favicon display was likely the “excessive page title duplication”; whereas for other individual bloggers, the reasons for the favicon not displaying may not be the same.
In other words,This type of problem does not have a single unified trigger condition, but rather depends on the comprehensive performance of the site across multiple dimensions such as structure, content, and expression, requiring analysis based on specific circumstances.
From these signals, it can be seen that Bing is not judging a specific problem, but is evaluating a more holistic attribute: whether this site is “clear” enough to be stably understood.
5 Optional: Force refresh favicon via Support
In the previous analysis, we have gradually established a relatively complete framework of understanding: the display of the favicon is not a simple “technical issue,” nor is it something that will automatically appear as long as it is recognized as a site, but is a result built upon the two stages of “site recognition + display judgment.”
In other words, only when a site reaches a certain level in multiple dimensions such as structural clarity, content distinctiveness, and overall expression, is Bing more likely to display the favicon in search results.
But in the actual process, there is also a relatively common situation:Even if these conditions are met, the favicon may still not appear for a long time. This does not necessarily mean that the judgment failed, but is more likely because:Bing's evaluation of site status is not a real-time triggered process—there is usually a certain periodic update mechanism in search engines between crawling, parsing, modeling, and final display. Even if the site itself has changed, this change may not be immediately reflected in search results.
From this perspective, the display of the favicon sometimes seems more like a “delayed effect” rather than “instant feedback.” It is precisely against this background that a seemingly “non-technical” method exists—by submitting a support request to have Bing actively re-evaluate the site's display status.
Friends who need to submit a support request can follow the graphic tutorial below. The support entry can be found at the ”?” in the top right corner of Bing's Webmaster Tools:
Click the ”Bing Webmaster Support” link below:
Then click the ”Raise support request” link at the very bottom of the page:
Then you can fill it out according to the following template:
For everyone's convenience, I have also pasted the description text separately below:
My site’s favicon is not showing in Bing search results, even though the site is fully crawled and recognized. I believe this is related to site structure and content signals, as reported in Webmaster Tools, and would like Bing to refresh or recrawl the favicon.
By submitting a problem description, you can request a check or refresh of a site's search results. In many actual cases, this method can indeed prompt the favicon to appear in search results within a relatively short period of time.
Note: After submission, you will usually receive the first manual reply within 48 hours, though it is said that there are cases where it takes effect directly without a reply. However, I estimate this situation is very rare, so just keep an eye on it during those few days.
However, it needs to be specially noted that,Support is not about letting Bing completely bypass the rules, but about letting it re-evaluate existing site signals. In other words, if a site itself has obvious problems in basic conditions such as structure, content distinctiveness, and title uniqueness, then even if Support is submitted, it is very likely not to produce immediate results, or the results will not be obvious. Support is more of a “trigger” to accelerate the reprocessing of sites that already meet the full display conditions by the system, rather than a substitute for the rules themselves.
Of course, a very small number of edge cases cannot be ruled out. Some sites may not fully comply with the rules in certain details, but after manually submitting Support, displays like the favicon or sitelink may appear ahead of time. This situation is an exception rather than the norm, so one cannot rely on Support to “break the rules.” Overall, the site must first meet the basic conditions for Support to truly play a role; otherwise, it will only trigger an invalid re-evaluation.
Understood from this perspective, the significance of Support does not lie in changing the rules, but in making the displays already permitted by the rules take effect faster, while providing a means of manual intervention to reduce the waiting time caused by evaluation cycles or update delays. In other words, it is an acceleration and refresh mechanism, not a master key.
4 Afterword: This is actually not just a favicon issue
Writing up to this point, this question actually has a relatively clear answer. In the beginning, I just wanted to understand a very specific thing: why some websites do not have a favicon in Bing search results, while others can display it normally. It seemed more like a question of “whether the configuration was written correctly,” and one could even find various “summaries of experience” with just a quick search.
But when I actually started to compare, verify, and bring these claims into real-world scenarios one by one, things gradually became less simple. Time, index volume, external links, and traffic—these seemingly reasonable explanations do not hold water in the face of specific cases; the so-called “technical issues” are also hard to justify given that Google performs normally.
It is only when the problem is broken down that one discovers:the favicon has never been an independent issue. It is only a result, not a cause.
What is actually happening is a whole set of judgments made by the search engine behind a site—from the initial page crawling, to structural understanding, and then to the decision of “whether to display in the form of a site.” This entire process is itself phased and is not necessarily completed in real-time. And on this point,Bing's performance is particularly obvious。
In actual observation, Bing often splits “site recognition” and “display decision” into two relatively independent stages: a site may have already been fully recognized (for example, sitelinks appear), but for a period of time, it still will not display the favicon. This phenomenon of “the capability is already there, but the display is delayed” is not uncommon in Bing.
And it is precisely because of this that the “seemingly unreasonable” phenomena we saw earlier occur: the site has already been recognized, but the favicon still has not appeared; the issue has been fixed, but the error in Webmaster Tools still exists; and in some cases, after manually submitting a support request, the results change significantly in a short period of time.
These phenomena themselves actually point to the same thing:The search engine's judgment is not a one-time event, but a process of continuous updating and constant correction. In other words, it is more like “gradually confirming” a site, rather than making a final conclusion at a single point in time. Looking back at the favicon from this perspective, we discover a more fundamental fact:It is not a question of “whether it can be displayed,” but rather “when it is deemed worthy of being displayed.”
It should be noted that this conclusion, in This is particularly evident in Bing's performance.. In the display of the favicon, Bing indeed has a more obvious “delayed judgment” and “extra filtering” mechanism, which is also the premise on which most of the analysis in this article is based.
But if we zoom out the perspective a bit more, we will find that although different search engines differ in their specific strategies, they are actually connected on a more fundamental issue—They are all trying to answer the same thing: whether this site is clear enough to be understood and displayed as a “whole”.
Instead of focusing energy on “why the favicon didn't appear”, it is better to focus attention on a more fundamental issue—Whether your site already has a clear structure, stable content, and clear enough expression so that search engines can understand it without ambiguity.
When the answer to this question is affirmative, then the appearance of the favicon is often just a matter of time; and when this issue itself is not yet fully established, any optimization for the “icon” is likely to be just superficial work.
In this sense, what this article really wants to explain is perhaps not the favicon itself, but a more general understanding: many seemingly scattered and occasional issues actually have a deeper system logic behind them. Only when we are willing to look one layer deeper and restore the issue from “phenomenon” to “mechanism”, many things that were originally vague or even metaphysical will instead become clear.
And once these logics are understood, you might find—The favicon is only the result, and “whether it is treated as a site” is the issue itself。