🔍 Understanding the Squarespace /home Issue

Squarespace automatically redirects your root domain (yourdomain.com) to yourdomain.com/home. This behaviour is built into Squarespace's platform and cannot be disabled from within Squarespace itself. When OTTO crawls and optimises your site, this forced redirect can cause it to treat / and /home as two separate pages, leading to duplicate content signals and index confusion.

This is a known platform-level limitation with Squarespace, not a bug within OTTO. The sections below explain how OTTO currently handles this and what steps you can take to minimise its impact.

⚙️ How OTTO Handles the /home Redirect

OTTO's infrastructure recognises the /home redirect pattern common to Squarespace sites. When OTTO detects this redirect during its crawl, it attempts to consolidate signals from both URLs and treat the root domain as the canonical home page. However, depending on your site's configuration, some duplication flags may still surface in your reports. This is expected behaviour while Squarespace enforces the redirect at the server level.

📊 What You May See in Your Reports

• Duplicate page warnings — OTTO or your audit report flags both / and /home as separate URLs with identical content.
• Index coverage issues — Google Search Console may show both variants being crawled or indexed.
• Home page listed twice — Your site's internal link structure may reference both versions of the URL.

These findings do not necessarily indicate a critical SEO problem, but resolving them will improve your site's clarity for search engines.

🚀 Steps to Reduce Duplication Impact

1. Set a canonical tag on your home page. In Squarespace, navigate to Pages → Home Page → SEO Settings and ensure the canonical URL points to your root domain (yourdomain.com/), not yourdomain.com/home. This tells search engines which version is authoritative.
2. Update your internal links. Check that all internal links pointing to your home page use the root domain format (yourdomain.com/) rather than the /home variant. Consistent internal linking reinforces the canonical signal.
3. Submit your preferred URL to Google Search Console. Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to request indexing of yourdomain.com/ and confirm it is the version Google recognises as canonical.
4. Re-run an OTTO crawl after making changes. In Search Atlas, go to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) in the left sidebar, then trigger a new crawl of your site. This allows OTTO to pick up your updated canonical signals and refresh its analysis.
5. Monitor your index coverage report. After a few days, revisit Google Search Console to confirm that only the preferred URL is being indexed and that duplicate warnings have been resolved.

💡 Squarespace Platform Limitations to Keep in Mind

Because the /home redirect is enforced by Squarespace at the infrastructure level, neither OTTO nor any third-party SEO tool can fully prevent Squarespace from issuing this redirect. The steps above represent the most effective workarounds available within Squarespace's constraints. Squarespace has historically maintained this behaviour across plan types, so it is important to manage it proactively rather than waiting for a platform change.

If Squarespace releases an update that allows users to disable or modify the /home redirect, OTTO's integration will continue to adapt accordingly. Search Atlas monitors these platform changes and updates OTTO's crawl logic as needed.

🛠️ Still Seeing Issues After Following These Steps?

If you have completed all the steps above and are still experiencing duplication warnings or unexpected behaviour with your Squarespace home page in OTTO, our team is here to help investigate your specific site configuration.

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.