What Vemetric Favicon does
Vemetric Favicon is the fetcher behind Vemetric's free favicon API, which returns the favicon for any domain passed to it without authentication or API keys. It can resize the image (64 pixels by default) and convert it to png, jpg, or webp, returning either the image itself or JSON metadata. Callers can also supply a fallback icon URL for domains where no favicon is found. The service is open source and can be self-hosted via Docker.
How to identify Vemetric Favicon
Temso identifies Vemetric Favicontraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
FaviconAPI\/Vemetric Favicon FAQ
What is Vemetric Favicon?
Vemetric Favicon is a free, open source API from the analytics company Vemetric that fetches a website's favicon when given a domain, with optional resizing and format conversion to png, jpg, or webp.
Can I block Vemetric Favicon with robots.txt?
The documentation does not state that the fetcher reads robots.txt or publish a robots.txt token for it. It requests your favicon when someone calls the API with your domain, rather than crawling your site.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
