It is shown that both the Camassa–Holm and Novikov equations are ill-posed in \(B_{p,r}^{1+1/p}(\mathbb {R})\) with \((p,r)\in [1,\infty ]\times (1,\infty ]\) in Guo et al. (J Differ Equ 266:1698–1707, 2019) and well-posed in \(B_{p,1}^{1+1/p}(\mathbb {R})\) with \(p\in [1,\infty )\) in Ye et al. (J Differ Equ 367: 729–748, 2023). Recently, the ill-posedness for the Camassa–Holm equation in \(B^{1}_{\infty ,1}(\mathbb {R})\) has been proved in Guo et al. (J Differ Equ 327: 127–144, 2022). In this paper, we shall solve the only left an endpoint case \(r=1\) for the Novikov equation. More precisely, we prove the ill-posedness for the Novikov equation in \(B^{1}_{\infty ,1}(\mathbb {R})\) by exhibiting the norm inflation phenomena.