The apple-touch-icon: Crawl Audit check 200

Short answer: when someone adds your site to their iPhone or iPad home screen, iOS uses the apple-touch-icon as the app-style icon. Check 200 warns if the page doesn't declare one.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a <link rel="apple-touch-icon"> tag.
• Warning: none.

It doesn't check the size, and it doesn't accept the older apple-touch-icon-precomposed name.

What the sources say

• MDN: iOS doesn't use the normal rel="icon" tag for home-screen icons, so this separate tag is needed.
• web.dev: "apple-touch-icon is applied only when the user adds a site to home screen".
• Apple's own guide, last updated in 2016, uses 180 by 180 pixels for retina iPhones and also lets you simply place a file called apple-touch-icon.png in your site's root folder.
• Google also accepts apple-touch-icon as a source for the favicon in search results (check 199).

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">

Making it

• A 180 by 180 pixel PNG.
• Square and not transparent. web.dev advises "a square non-transparent icon" for better compatibility.

On devmarde.com

We declare a 180 by 180 pixel apple-touch-icon. It passes.

Sources

• MDN, HTML attribute: rel, and web.dev, Document structure.
• Apple, Configuring web applications (archived, 2016), and Google Search Central, Define a favicon, checked 6 October 2026.