Download websites that use Favicon

About Favicon

The small square in a browser tab started life in 1999 as decoration for a bookmark list, and it became a habit nobody thinks about. A site ships one for the tab, the bookmarks and the history menu, and nearly every maintained site ships one. A marker that ordinary says little about the domains carrying it and a good deal about the domains that do not.

As of October 2026 we record Favicon on 93,092,529 domains, which places it among the markers that describe the shape of the web rather than a slice of it. The HTML marker label is an honest description of what the detection is. We read the page, find a link element declaring an icon or an icon served from the conventional root path, and record that the site declares one. We do not judge the file, its format or whether a browser renders it. A domain either advertises an icon or it does not.

The distinction matters because the field works best inverted. Parked domains, expired registration holding pages, bare directory listings and machine generated spam networks frequently ship nothing at all, because nobody ever opened the site in a browser and noticed the blank square. Registrars measuring how much of their book is genuinely in use, agencies cleaning an outreach list before it burns their sending reputation, and researchers separating live properties from placeholders all reach for the same split. Keep the domains that resolve and serve HTML, then divide on whether an icon is declared. The half without one is where dormant and automated inventory concentrates.

Geography complicates that split in a way worth knowing before you rely on it. United States accounts for 44,211,353 of the domains carrying the marker, and the suffix weight sits on .com. The concentration is a statement about where hosting and registration cluster, not about national web habits, because our country attribution follows the serving infrastructure rather than the owner's address. Anyone segmenting by market should treat the country column as a hosting fact and confirm ownership from the domain itself.

A per domain lookup answers a different question from the download. Checking one site tells you that one site has an icon, which is rarely worth knowing. The population question is the one that pays. What proportion of a registrar's newly created domains ever get one, how the presence rate differs between a country code suffix and a generic one, whether a hosting provider's customers abandon their sites faster than another provider's do. Questions of that kind need the full list of domains and their markers in a file you can join against your own records, sort, and run again next month against a fresh copy.

The limits are worth stating plainly. Detection is driven by markup and by what the server hands us, so a site that quietly serves an icon at the root path without declaring it, or that hides behind an interstitial, a bot wall or a country block while we crawl, can be recorded as having none. Modern themes and site builders ship a default icon whether or not the owner cared, which makes presence weaker evidence of maintenance than absence is evidence of neglect. Treated as one cheap column among several rather than a verdict, Favicon does honest work in a filter and very little on its own.