Google's Search Central channel premiered a new video series called The Non-Canonical Cabinet on October 14, 2026, with Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin answering edge case questions that would never make it onto a standard FAQ page. The first episode asks whether a chicken emoji can go in a domain name or a URL, and the answer is different for each.
Domains follow internet standards, not Google
The hosts explained that the domain is governed by ICANN and the IETF through RFC 1035 and RFC 1123, which allow letters, numbers and hyphens. Google follows those same standards. Internationalized domain names are also allowed, so Chinese or Arabic characters work, and they are stored as Punycode starting with "xn--" while browsers show the native script. Emojis are not permitted in domain names, and the hosts warned that lookalike characters, such as a Cyrillic letter that resembles an English P, confuse users and browsers alike.
On rankings, Illyes said keywords in a domain or URL are an incredibly small signal that only matters when Google has nothing else to go on, such as a brand new site with no content. Once there is content on the page the signal becomes basically irrelevant.
The URL path is more flexible, but not always readable
Everything after the .com follows the URL standard, which allows world alphabets, numbers and special characters like exclamation marks and parentheses. An emoji in the path is technically fine and Googlebot will crawl and process it. The path uses percent encoding, while the domain uses Punycode, because the front of the URL is read by domain name servers and the back by web servers.
The hosts' concern is display. Some browsers and social apps show the emoji as a string of percent signs and hex codes, and a link that looks like that is less likely to be clicked or shared. They also noted that some users rely on the address bar to understand where they are on a site, so a clean URL builds trust. Simple descriptive words, and even full sentences, are recommended.
Hyphens over underscores
In the path, Google treats words joined by underscores as one long word. Hyphens are the universal word separator, so chicken-gear is preferred over chicken_gear.
Important Points Discussed
Hyphen or underscore in a URL?
Hyphen. Underscores join words into one in Google's eyes.
Can an emoji go in a domain name?
No. The internet standards for domains do not allow emojis.
Can an emoji go in a URL path?
Yes, and Google can crawl it, but it may display as unreadable characters in some places.
Do keywords in the URL help rankings?
Only slightly, and only when a page has no other content for Google to judge.
Are non-English characters allowed in a domain?
Yes, through internationalized domain names, converted to Punycode behind the scenes.
The next episode will try putting a chicken in the robots.txt file. Until then, a quick crawl of your own site for underscores in URL paths is an easy check to run this week. Check your site performance at h2fi.com
Watch Full epiosode at Youtube