# Site and referrer icons

> Your sites and referrers are shown with their favicon. See where the icons come from, how often they refresh and how our fetcher identifies itself.

Your sites and the sites that send you visitors are shown with their
icon (the favicon you see in a browser tab). It makes a long list of
referrers quicker to read. There is nothing to set up, and it is on every
plan.

## Where you see them

- The site switcher at the top of the sidebar, and the **All sites** page.
- Every list of referrers: the **Sources** card on the overview, the
  **Referrers** report and a referrer's own page, the sources of a page or
  an event, **Live**, the wallboard and shared dashboards.

A domain with no icon yet, or with none at all, shows a small globe.

## Which icon is shown

One icon is kept per registered domain. `gemini.google.com` and
`mail.google.com` both show the icon of `google.com`, and
`docs.example.com` shows the icon of `example.com`.

We take the icon the home page declares (`<link rel="icon">` or an Apple
touch icon), and `/favicon.ico` when it declares none. PNG, ICO, GIF,
JPEG and WebP files up to 100 KB are used. SVG icons are not.

## How fresh they are

- A new site and a referrer we have not seen before get their icon within
  about 15 minutes.
- Every icon is fetched again every 30 days, so a new logo shows up within
  a month.
- When a domain stops answering, the icon we have keeps showing while we
  try again after 1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks and 1 month. After that the icon
  is removed.

## Fetcher

Icons are fetched by our own fetcher, `PrivatusIconBot`. It sends this
`User-Agent`:

```
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PrivatusIconBot/1.0; +https://privatusanalytics.com/docs/features/domain-icons#fetcher)
```

It asks for a domain's `robots.txt`, its home page and its icon file,
about once a month, and nothing else. It never runs scripts, so it is
never counted as a visit, and it only reads public pages.

It obeys `robots.txt` for the home page, following the rules for
`PrivatusIconBot` and then the rules for `*`. Where the home page is
disallowed it does not fetch it and only asks for `/favicon.ico`, the
file every browser asks for. To keep it away altogether, block the
`User-Agent` on your server. Your site then shows the globe.

## Privacy

An icon belongs to a domain, not to a person. Fetching one sends nothing
about your visitors or your account to the other site, and the images are
served from our own storage, so your browser never contacts a referrer's
server when you open a report.