🤔 What Is the Difference Between a Recrawl and a Weekly Analysis?
OTTO runs two distinct processes to evaluate your site's SEO health: a manual recrawl that you trigger on demand, and an automated weekly analysis that runs in the background on a fixed schedule. Understanding what each one does helps you use OTTO more effectively after making changes to your site.
📅 How the Weekly Analysis Works
OTTO automatically re-analyses your site once every seven days. This cycle is designed to keep your SEO recommendations fresh without requiring any action from you. During a weekly analysis, OTTO:
- Re-evaluates all previously identified SEO issues across your site
- Detects new issues that may have appeared since the last cycle
- Updates recommendation statuses based on the latest state of your pages
- Refreshes performance data and opportunity scores
Because the weekly analysis runs on a set schedule, it is best suited for routine monitoring rather than verifying a specific fix you have just deployed.
🔍 What a Manual Recrawl Does
A manual recrawl lets you immediately re-examine your site after you have made code or content changes. Instead of waiting up to seven days for the next scheduled cycle, you can trigger OTTO to crawl your site right away and confirm whether your fixes have resolved the flagged recommendations.
During a manual recrawl, OTTO:
- Re-crawls the pages associated with active recommendations
- Checks whether previously flagged issues are now resolved
- Updates the status of affected recommendations in real time
- Reflects any structural or on-page changes you have implemented
A manual recrawl is scoped to your existing recommendations — it validates fixes rather than performing a full discovery sweep of brand-new issues. For a comprehensive discovery of new issues, the weekly analysis cycle handles that automatically.
🛠️ How to Trigger a Manual Recrawl in OTTO
- In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then navigate to Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview).
- Locate the site session you want to recrawl.
- Click the Recrawl Site button associated with that session. The button is typically displayed near the top of the session overview or within the site's action menu.
- OTTO will begin crawling immediately. Depending on your site's size, this may take a few minutes to complete.
- Once the recrawl finishes, return to your recommendations list to review updated statuses and confirm that your fixes have been picked up.
✅ When Should You Use Each Option?
- Use a manual recrawl when you have just pushed code changes, updated meta tags, fixed broken links, or resolved any specific recommendation and want immediate confirmation.
- Rely on the weekly analysis for ongoing site health monitoring, discovering new SEO opportunities, and tracking overall progress over time without manual intervention.
💡 Tips for Getting Accurate Recrawl Results
- Make sure your code changes are fully deployed and live before triggering a recrawl. OTTO crawls the live version of your site, so any changes still in staging will not be reflected.
- Clear your CDN or server cache before recrawling to ensure OTTO reads the most up-to-date version of your pages.
- Allow the recrawl to complete fully before reviewing results — checking mid-crawl may show incomplete data.
💬 Need More 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.
Additional Notes
Immediate recrawl does NOT detect: deleted/redirected pages, codebase-level modifications, new pages added, site architecture/navigation changes, server-side rendering/framework-level changes. Results typically reflected within a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on site size.