🔍 Why Your Site Audit Score May Drop After Fixing Issues

It can be frustrating to complete all suggested tasks and still see your Site Audit score fall. This is a common experience and usually has a straightforward explanation. Here is what is likely happening:

• New issues are being detected. Search Atlas continuously crawls your site. As new pages are published or existing pages change, the crawler discovers fresh technical issues that did not exist during the previous audit. Even if you resolved every prior issue, new ones can push the score down.
• The score reflects a percentage of healthy pages. Your audit score is calculated against the total number of pages crawled. If your site grows — more pages indexed, more URLs discovered — the denominator increases. A handful of new errors on new pages can reduce your overall percentage even though your previous fixes are still in place.
• Fixes have not yet been re-crawled. Search Atlas needs to re-audit your site to register resolved issues. If you fixed something but have not triggered a fresh crawl, the score will not update until the next scheduled or manual audit run.
• Previously hidden pages are now crawlable. Changes to your robots.txt, sitemap, or internal linking structure can expose pages that were previously excluded. These newly discovered pages may carry their own issues.

The key takeaway: a dropping score does not always mean your work was wasted. It often means the audit is surfacing deeper layers of your site that were not visible before.

✅ How to Stabilise and Improve Your Site Audit Score

1. Re-run the audit after each round of fixes. Navigate to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar, then open SEO Automation (or go to /seo-automation-v3) and trigger a new crawl so your resolved issues are reflected in the latest score.
2. Prioritise issues by severity. Focus on critical and high-severity errors first. Resolving a large number of warnings will have less impact than fixing a smaller number of critical errors.
3. Review newly discovered pages. After each crawl, filter for issues on URLs that are new to the report. This helps you catch problems introduced by recent site changes before they compound.
4. Check your crawl scope settings. Make sure the audit is scoped correctly so it is not repeatedly discovering large sections of your site that contain known, acceptable issues (such as paginated archive pages).

🚀 Understanding the OTTO Authority Score of 0

If OTTO shows an Authority score of 0, it does not mean something is broken. It means OTTO has not yet deployed any Authority-building actions for your site. OTTO's Authority module is separate from on-page optimisation and requires you to activate specific campaigns and tasks.

Authority in Search Atlas is built through deliberate off-page signals. A score of 0 simply indicates that the automated authority workflows have not been started yet.

🛠️ How to Start Building Authority with OTTO

Follow these steps to activate OTTO's Authority-building features:

1. In the left sidebar, click Authority.
2. Start with Cloud Stacks — navigate to Authority → Cloud Stacks. Cloud Stacks create a network of high-authority web properties that link back to your site, signalling trust and relevance to search engines.
3. Use the URL Indexer at Authority → URL Indexer to ensure your important pages and newly built authority assets are indexed quickly by search engines.
4. Explore QUEST LLM Visibility at Authority → QUEST LLM Visibility to optimise your brand's presence in AI-generated search results and large language model outputs.
5. Set up outreach and link-building workflows under Authority → Campaigns. Campaigns allow OTTO to automate press release distribution and other authority signals at scale.
6. Monitor responses and opportunities in Authority → Inbox and review what has been sent via Authority → Sent.

Once OTTO begins executing Authority tasks, your Authority score will start to increase as actions are completed and signals are registered.

💡 Tips for Getting the Most from Authority Building

• Allow time for results. Authority signals — especially backlinks and indexation — take days or weeks to be recognised by search engines. Check your score weekly rather than daily.
• Run Cloud Stacks before Campaigns. Building foundational authority assets first gives your outreach campaigns stronger linking destinations, improving their effectiveness.
• Keep your Site Audit score healthy in parallel. A technically sound site converts authority signals more effectively. Strong off-page authority combined with a clean technical foundation produces the best ranking outcomes.
• Use QUEST LLM Visibility proactively. As AI-driven search results become more prominent, ensuring your brand appears in LLM outputs is an increasingly important part of a complete authority strategy.

📞 Still Need Help?

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.