🔍 Overview
OTTO is Search Atlas's AI-powered SEO automation tool. When customers first activate OTTO or deploy its recommendations, they sometimes notice unexpected website behavior — such as broken pages, slower load times, or network-related errors. This article helps you understand what to do if something goes wrong during or after OTTO setup, and how to get help if issues persist.
⚙️ What OTTO Does to Your Site
OTTO applies on-page and technical SEO optimizations automatically. If you notice unexpected website behavior after activating or deploying OTTO recommendations, it is worth checking whether the timing of the issue coincides with recent OTTO activity before assuming another cause.
If you are experiencing network-level errors (such as 502 or 504 gateway timeouts, SSL failures, or DNS resolution issues), these are likely unrelated to OTTO and should be investigated with your hosting provider.
🚨 Is OTTO Causing My Website Errors?
Before assuming OTTO is responsible for an issue, work through this quick checklist:
- Check the timing. Did the errors begin within minutes of deploying OTTO recommendations? If the issue started hours or days later, OTTO is unlikely to be the cause.
- Identify the error type. Page-level issues (broken layouts, missing content, redirects) could be related to OTTO changes. Server or network errors (5xx status codes, SSL warnings, DNS failures) are outside OTTO's scope.
- Test a specific page. If only certain pages are affected, check whether OTTO made changes to those pages specifically.
↩️ Should I Restore My Site or Remove OTTO?
In most cases, a full site restore is not necessary. Try these targeted steps first:
- Review OTTO activity. Check your OTTO setup within Search Atlas to identify which recommendations were recently deployed and compare the deployment timing with when your errors first appeared.
- Revert recent changes if possible. Depending on your setup, you may be able to undo recent OTTO-applied changes through your CMS or site backup before considering a full restore.
- Use your CMS backup tools. If something looks wrong with your content, check your CMS revision history before performing a full site restore.
- Perform a full restore only as a last resort. A full restore removes all OTTO progress and should only be considered if targeted reversions do not resolve the issue.
📋 What to Have Ready When Escalating
If you are unable to resolve the issue on your own, please have the following information ready before reaching out to our team:
- Your project or website name in Search Atlas
- The exact error message or description of the unexpected behavior
- The approximate date and time the issue first appeared
- Any steps you have already taken to investigate or resolve the issue
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.