Favicon History Viewer

See every favicon a website has ever used, straight from the Wayback Machine. Compare old and new icons, follow a brand’s redesigns year by year, and download any version. Checking a site’s current icons instead? Use the Favicon Checker or the Favicon Extractor.

Wayback Machine archive Unique versions only ICO, PNG or ZIP
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How to see a website’s old favicons

  1. Enter a website. Type a domain such as apple.com, or paste any URL from the site.
  2. Let the archive answer. The viewer checks the standard favicon paths, then old homepages for custom icon locations, and shows its progress.
  3. Explore the versions. Switch between the grid and the timeline, filter by year or source, and pick two icons to compare side by side.
  4. Download. Save any icon in its original format or as PNG, download everything as a ZIP, or open the archived page.

Found an icon you like? Rebuild your own from a sharp image with PNG to ICO or the Favicon Generator.

How the Wayback Machine stores favicons

The Wayback Machine saves files, not just pages.

Every time its crawler fetched /favicon.ico or an Apple touch icon, it kept a copy with the date and a content hash.

This viewer asks the archive for all of those copies and keeps one per distinct file. Each card shows when that version was first captured, and the Archive link opens the exact snapshot.

  • Standard paths - /favicon.ico, /favicon.png, /favicon-32x32.png and similar.
  • Touch icons - /apple-touch-icon.png and its sized versions, usually 180 px.
  • Custom paths - icons in folders like /images/, found by reading old homepages.

Why favicon history is useful

A favicon changes with every big redesign, so its history is a neat timeline of a brand.

Designers use it for rebrand research, writers and researchers to date a logo change, and developers to recover an icon whose source files are long gone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Type the domain into the Favicon History Viewer and press View history. It searches the Wayback Machine for every archived copy of the site’s favicon and shows each distinct version with the date it was first captured.

From the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has been saving the web since 1996. We query its CDX index for favicon files and keep one entry per distinct file, using the archive’s content hash, so repeated captures of the same icon are shown once.

The favicon is usually a small version of the logo, so its history is a quick way to see how a logo changed. Apple touch icons, which are larger, are included too.

For the full logo, open any version’s Archive link to see the whole page as it looked on that date.

The Wayback Machine does not save every file on every visit. If a site was crawled rarely, or its favicon lived at an unusual address, some versions were never archived.

The deep scan reads old homepages to find custom icon paths, which recovers many of them.

Yes. With more than two versions on screen, Download all builds a ZIP in your browser with every icon named by date, a CSV timeline and a README. A year or source filter limits the ZIP to what you see.

Some captures are incomplete, and some old ICO files use formats browsers draw poorly. The download usually still works.

Save it as PNG with the PNG button, or convert the ICO with ICO to PNG.

Old favicons belong to the brands that made them, so use them for research, design history and reference.

For your own site, make an original one with the Favicon Generator or a full set with the Favicon Package Generator.

The Wayback Machine searches an enormous index and can be slow at busy times. The viewer works in short steps and shows its progress, and results are cached for 24 hours, so the same domain loads instantly next time.

Guides & Tutorials

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