s2/favicons endpoint fetches a website’s favicon, not its logo, but it’s free and shows up often as a quick hack for displaying company “logos.” It’s worth understanding what it actually returns before relying on it.
Brand quality & time to value
There’s no brand dataset behind Google’s endpoint, it returns whatever favicon happens to be declared in a site’s HTML at request time, with no check that it represents the brand at all. Brandfetch resolves an actual logo for 95% of brands in its core distribution, and 86% even at the extreme long tail of small, non-tech businesses, measured and published openly. That gap turns into engineering time, not just a worse-looking result. Teams pulling from Google’s endpoint end up writing their own detection for missing, generic, or wrong-looking favicons before they can ship. A link that’s already been verified against real brand data skips that work entirely.Quick comparison
How requests compare
Google Favicon APIWhy a favicon isn’t a logo
Favicons are designed to be legible at 16x16 pixels in a browser tab, not to represent a brand in a product UI. Most sites’ favicons are cropped, low-resolution, or a generic icon unrelated to the brand’s actual logo. There’s no way to request a full logo, a dark-mode variant, or a specific brand asset type from Google’s endpoint, because it was never built to serve one.Why teams choose Brandfetch
- Real logos, not favicons. Every request pulls from Brandfetch’s brand dataset, not a compressed browser-tab icon.
- Built for production. 100% uptime and documented rate limits, backed by a team that maintains it.
- Actual customization. Size, format, theme, type, and fallback are all first-class parameters.
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Logo API overview
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