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

Two unrelated Search Console problems closed out on the same day. 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, both around 5pm ET on Sunday, 23 August 2026.

What was the favicon bug?#

For about a week, Google search results showed a generic globe icon instead of a site’s real favicon for many sites, unrelated to any change the sites themselves had made. Site owners flagged it in Google’s help forums as the icon most searchers use to visually confirm a result before clicking.

Google’s Rajan Patel addressed it directly on Saturday, 22 August, saying the fix was “not fixed yet, but should be in the next 12 hours or so.” The fix landed the following day, Sunday 23 August, around 5pm ET, roughly a day after that estimate.

What was the crawl stats gap?#

Separately, the Crawl Stats report in Search Console, the tool that shows how often Googlebot requests a site’s pages, was missing about two days of data starting around 14 to 15 August 2026. Google restored the missing data points on the same Sunday as the favicon fix, around 5pm ET.

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.