Google appears to be using the apple-touch-icon link when making favicon circles to show in search results. Unfortunately, these images are optimised for being displayed at apple touch sizes (ie relatively big images on high-density screens), and they're not optimised for favicons (for instance for our .ico favicon we have two dots either side of the crown's central jewel rather than two).
We can't just turn off the apple-touch-icon links in our pages, unfortunately, so we need to see if there's another way that we can signal to Google that it should use the icons, not try to fabricate its own lo-res versions from the touch icon.
(Related JIRA ticket: https://gov-uk.atlassian.net/browse/PNP-5191)
Google appears to be using the apple-touch-icon link when making favicon circles to show in search results. Unfortunately, these images are optimised for being displayed at apple touch sizes (ie relatively big images on high-density screens), and they're not optimised for favicons (for instance for our .ico favicon we have two dots either side of the crown's central jewel rather than two).
We can't just turn off the apple-touch-icon links in our pages, unfortunately, so we need to see if there's another way that we can signal to Google that it should use the icons, not try to fabricate its own lo-res versions from the touch icon.
(Related JIRA ticket: https://gov-uk.atlassian.net/browse/PNP-5191)