Get a Website's Favicon URL with JavaScript (Google, DDG)

To get a website’s favicon URL with JavaScript, hand the domain to a public favicon service — Google’s, DuckDuckGo’s, or one of the alternatives. They return a ready-to-use image URL you can drop straight into <img src>. Parsing the site’s own HTML works in theory but is blocked by CORS in practice.

Contents

Google favicon service
DuckDuckGo favicon service
Direct /favicon.ico fallback
Graceful fallback chain
Frequently asked questions
Related guides
References

Last verified: 2026-05-17. Originally published 2022-07-21, rewritten and updated 2026-05-17.

Google favicon service

// 16px (legacy s2 endpoint, still works)
https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=https://www.how7o.com

// faviconV2 — supports a size param
https://t3.gstatic.com/faviconV2?client=SOCIAL&type=FAVICON&fallback_opts=TYPE,SIZE,URL&url=https://www.how7o.com&size=32

function googleFavicon(url, size = 32) {
  const u = encodeURIComponent(url);
  return `https://t3.gstatic.com/faviconV2?client=SOCIAL&type=FAVICON&fallback_opts=TYPE,SIZE,URL&url=${u}&size=${size}`;
}

// Usage in an 
img.src = googleFavicon('https://www.how7o.com', 32);

DuckDuckGo favicon service

function ddgFavicon(url) {
  const { hostname } = new URL(url);
  return `https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip3/${hostname}.ico`;
}

img.src = ddgFavicon('https://www.how7o.com');

DuckDuckGo’s service returns a 16×16 favicon for the bare hostname. Simpler API, no query string, and less likely to be blocked by privacy-focused extensions.

Direct `/favicon.ico` fallback

function bareFavicon(url) {
  const { origin } = new URL(url);
  return `${origin}/favicon.ico`;
}

The original favicon convention is just {origin}/favicon.ico. Many sites still serve it there (browsers fall back to this if no <link rel="icon"> is declared). Loading it directly from a browser bypasses any service entirely, but it 404s on sites that use modern <link rel="icon"> with a non-default path.

Graceful fallback chain

function setFavicon(imgEl, siteUrl) {
  const tries = [
    googleFavicon(siteUrl, 32),
    ddgFavicon(siteUrl),
    bareFavicon(siteUrl),
    '/default-icon.png',
  ];

  let i = 0;
  imgEl.onerror = () => { if (i < tries.length - 1) imgEl.src = tries[++i]; };
  imgEl.src = tries[0];
}

Each fallback only kicks in if the previous one errors. The last entry is a local default so users always see something even when every external service is unreachable.

Frequently asked questions

Why not just fetch the page HTML and parse the <link rel="icon"> tag?

You can, but it usually fails — fetching another origin’s HTML from JavaScript is blocked by CORS unless that site explicitly opted in. Even when it works, the page may declare its favicon with a relative URL, multiple sizes, or none at all (in which case the browser falls back to /favicon.ico). The third-party services below sidestep all of that.

Is Google’s favicon service still working in 2026?

Yes — https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=... still serves 16px favicons, and the newer faviconV2 endpoint at t3.gstatic.com supports a size parameter. Google has rate limits and may return a default globe icon when the target site is unreachable or doesn’t have a favicon. It’s not a documented public API, so don’t build mission-critical features on it.

Are there documented alternatives?

DuckDuckGo’s icon service is the most-cited public alternative: https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip3/{domain}.ico. Other options include https://www.faviconkit.com/{domain}/{size} and self-hosting via something like the open-source favicon proxies on GitHub. For an extension that needs reliability, fetching once and caching the icon as a Blob in IndexedDB is the durable approach.

Will browsers block requests to these services as a privacy issue?

Some privacy-focused browsers and content blockers do block requests to s2.googleusercontent.com and similar trackers. In a Chrome extension that’s listing user bookmarks, this is rarely an issue (the user opted in by installing the extension). On a public website, prefer DuckDuckGo’s service or self-hosted icons to avoid setting third-party cookies on your visitors.