🔍 Overview

When using OTTO Audit AI to generate alt text suggestions for images, some customers find that the AI suggestions fail to appear or the field remains empty. This guide walks you through the most common causes and how to resolve them quickly.

✅ Before You Begin: Quick Checklist

Before troubleshooting, confirm the following:

• You are navigating via Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → SEO Automation (URL: /seo-automation-v3).
• Your OTTO session is active and fully loaded — look for the green status indicator next to your site.
• The images you are targeting are indexed within OTTO's audit scope (i.e., they were detected during the most recent site audit).
• Your browser is up to date and you are not using a browser extension that may block scripts (such as an ad blocker).

🚧 Common Causes and Fixes

Work through each of the following scenarios in order. Most customers resolve the issue within the first two steps.

1. Audit has not completed or is still processing. OTTO must finish a full site audit before alt text opportunities are surfaced. Navigate to OTTO SEO → SEO Automation and check the audit status at the top of the dashboard. If the audit shows In Progress, wait for it to complete, then refresh the page and try again.
2. No images with missing alt text were detected. If all images on the audited pages already have alt text, OTTO will have no items to populate suggestions for. Scroll through the audit results under the Image Optimization section to confirm whether any alt text tasks are listed. If none appear, your images may already be optimised.
3. The AI suggestion button is not being triggered correctly. Click directly on the individual image task row to expand it, then look for the Generate with AI button within the expanded view. Clicking the button at the top-level list view without expanding the row first can cause the suggestion to appear to fail.
4. Session timeout or authentication issue. Log out of Search Atlas completely, clear your browser cache, log back in, and navigate back to OTTO SEO → SEO Automation. Re-open the audit and attempt to generate alt text again.
5. Browser or network interference. Try generating alt text suggestions in an incognito or private browser window. Disable any browser extensions temporarily. If the suggestions populate in incognito mode, a browser extension is likely the cause.
6. Audit data is stale. If the audit was run more than a few days ago, the data may no longer reflect the current state of your site. Re-run the audit by selecting Recrawl Site within OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview), wait for it to complete, and then attempt to generate alt text suggestions again.

⚙️ How to Re-Run an Audit

1. Navigate to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview).
2. Select the site you are working on from the site selector at the top of the page.
3. Locate the Recrawl Site button and confirm the action.
4. Wait for the audit to reach 100% complete — this may take a few minutes depending on site size.
5. Once complete, open the Image Optimization section and click on an image task row to expand it.
6. Click Generate with AI to trigger the alt text suggestion.

💡 Tips for Best Results

• Ensure images are hosted on your domain or a CDN that OTTO can access. Images blocked by robots.txt or requiring authentication cannot be processed.
• AI-generated alt text works best when your page content is rich — OTTO uses surrounding page context to create relevant suggestions.
• After accepting a suggestion, deploy changes via the OTTO one-click deploy feature to push alt text updates live without touching your code.

🆘 Still Not Working?

If you have followed all the steps above and alt text suggestions are still not populating, our team can 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.