🔍 Why Your Brand Vault Needs a Successful Crawl
When you create a Brand Vault, Search Atlas first runs a site audit to understand your website's structure, content, and SEO health. If that initial crawl fails or gets stuck, the Brand Vault setup process cannot move forward. Resetting the audit is the fastest way to clear the block.
⚙️ Common Causes of Crawl Failures
Most crawl failures fall into a few recognizable categories. Review the list below to identify what may be affecting your site:
- Server or hosting blocks – Your server or CDN (such as Cloudflare) may be blocking our crawler's IP range or user agent.
- Robots.txt restrictions – A restrictive robots.txt file can prevent our crawler from accessing key pages.
- Sitemap errors – Missing, broken, or inaccessible XML sitemaps can cause the crawl to stall or return errors.
- Redirect loops – Circular redirects between HTTP/HTTPS or www/non-www versions can halt the crawl.
- Timeouts on large sites – Very large sites with thousands of pages may exceed the crawl window, causing an incomplete audit.
🚀 How to Reset Your Site Audit
If your audit is stuck or has failed, follow these steps to reset it:
- Navigate to OTTO SEO → Site Audit in the left sidebar of Search Atlas.
- Locate the site with the failed audit in your list of active projects.
- Open the site's dashboard and go to the site audit section.
- Reset the audit so that a new crawl is triggered for the site.
- Confirm the reset when prompted.
- Wait for the new crawl to begin — it should start within a few minutes.
✅ Verifying the Fix
After resetting the audit, check the following to confirm everything is working:
- The audit shows it is running again within 5–10 minutes.
- The crawl progress advances without stalling.
- Once the crawl completes successfully, return to your Brand Vault setup — the option to proceed should now be available.
💡 Tips to Prevent Future Failures
To minimize the chance of crawl failures on future audits, consider these proactive steps:
- Whitelist Search Atlas crawler IPs in your firewall, CDN, or security plugin.
- Ensure your robots.txt file allows access to important content sections.
- Keep your XML sitemap valid and submitted in the audit configuration.
- Resolve any redirect chain issues on your primary domain.
📞 Still Having Trouble?
If resetting the audit does not resolve the issue, our team can investigate the crawl logs and server response on your behalf. If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.