Today’s MarketingGoogle says Googlebot must follow redirects to reach your favicon
Google updated its favicon documentation to say Googlebot must be able to crawl the home page and follow any redirects to the page where the favicon is specified. Googlebot-Image must be able to crawl the favicon file, and none of these URLs can be blocked by robots.txt or other means. Search Engine Roundtable reads it as a clarification of the earlier wording.
Our take
Your favicon sits next to your result in Google, so a missing one makes your listing look less trustworthy. Crawl your homepage, follow every redirect to the favicon file and confirm robots.txt blocks none of those URLs. Teams that moved domains or added a www redirect this year should check first.
