Google confirmed on October 14 that emoji cannot appear in domain names, but can appear — and will be crawled — in URL paths. Gary Illyes, a Google Search analyst, delivered the ruling in the first episode of "The Non-Canonical Cabinet," a new Search Central YouTube series co-hosted with Cherry Prommawin that answers edge-case technical SEO questions.

The episode's own description frames its scope: "These are questions that don't belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features." Google teased the series with a trailer on October 6, eight days before the first episode went live, and invited viewers to submit their own edge cases in the comments of each post.

The format departs from Illyes's earlier "How Search Works," a five-part 2024 series that walked through crawling, indexing and serving. The new series starts with user questions rather than fundamentals, packaged — per the trailer — as a sitcom-style comedy.

Why can't domains contain emoji?

The rules differ sharply between the domain and the path. ICANN (the body that coordinates domain names) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) set domain standards, documented in RFC 1035 and RFC 1123: letters, numbers and hyphens. Prommawin confirmed Google adheres to those same standards.

Non-Roman scripts complicate the picture. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) let users register domains in native scripts such as Chinese or Arabic, which translate into Punycode — a string beginning "xn--". Browsers usually display the native script, but Illyes warned that some scripts contain lookalike characters: a Cyrillic letter, for instance, closely resembles an English "p."

On emoji specifically, current internet standards are unambiguous. A 2017 ICANN Board Resolution states that emoji are "disallowed by the current technical standards for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)" — although the resolution notes some country-code top-level domains still permit emoji registration at the second level.

What about emoji in the URL path?

Here the constraints loosen considerably. Illyes said Googlebot will crawl a path containing an emoji and "our system will actually process it." Browsers percent-encode those characters, so the episode's chicken emoji becomes %F0%9F%90%94 in the path.

The caveat is rendering, not crawling. Not every browser or social media app displays the emoji, Illyes noted, and some show "a string of gibberish" in its place. This aligns with Google's existing URL structure documentation, which recommends percent-encoding for non-ASCII characters and uses an emoji in one of its examples. Sites already following that documentation need no changes.

Do keywords in URLs affect rankings?

Barely, according to Illyes, who called URL keywords "an incredibly small signal." He was direct about when it matters:

"It really only matters when we have absolutely nothing else to go on."

His example: a site seconds old with no content. Once Google sees actual content, keywords in the domain and URL "become basically irrelevant," he said. The episode's closing recap advises viewers to stop trying to game search results by stuffing URLs with keyword data.

Illyes's position extends a consistent Google line. John Mueller, Search Advocate, called URL keywords a "very small ranking factor" in 2016 and a "very very lightweight factor" in 2021.

On word separators, Illyes said Google treats underscore-joined words in a path "as one long word." Sometimes that is fine, he added, because Google may still parse the words — but Google recommends hyphens as the common separator. Its documentation cites "historical reasons": underscores often mark concepts meant to stay together, such as function names in programming.

What does this change for site owners?

In practical terms, almost nothing for compliant sites. The path guidance restates existing documentation, and the keyword guidance gives SEOs an on-record citation for clients who demand high keyword density in URLs: such URLs carry value only when Google knows nothing else about the page.

The series also opens a channel. Each video's comments section accepts new edge-case questions outside the official documentation's coverage.

The next episode covers robots.txt. Neither video description gives a release schedule, and the trailer-to-episode gap of eight days suggests an irregular cadence — worth monitoring the Search Central channel rather than assuming a fixed timetable.