## **Why Your Site Audit Score May Still Drop After Fixing Issues**

Fixing suggested tasks is a great first step, but a dropping or stagnant Site Audit score is usually caused by one of the following reasons:

- **New issues were detected in a later crawl.** Each time your site is recrawled, OTTO may discover new technical problems that offset the fixes you applied. The score reflects the full picture of your site's health at the time of each crawl, not just the tasks you resolved.
- **Fixes have not yet been crawled.** The Site Audit score updates only after a fresh crawl is completed. If you fixed issues but a new crawl has not run, your score will not reflect those changes yet.
- **Underlying issues remain in related areas.** Resolving one category of tasks (for example, broken links) does not raise your score if other weighted categories (for example, Core Web Vitals or missing meta tags) still have open issues.
- **Score weighting.** Not all tasks carry equal weight. A small number of high-priority issues can lower your score significantly even when many lower-priority tasks are resolved.

To update your score, trigger a fresh crawl from OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) and click the Recrawl Site button once your fixes have been applied.

## **How OTTO Optimizations Interact With Site Audit Scoring**

OTTO applies on-page and technical optimizations directly to your site. However, Site Audit scoring and OTTO optimizations operate on separate cycles:

- OTTO deploys fixes when you approve or auto-apply tasks inside your project.
- The Site Audit score only updates after the next scheduled or manually triggered crawl.
- There may be a delay between a fix being deployed and the crawl capturing it.

This means a score of 0 or a very low score immediately after applying OTTO tasks does not necessarily indicate the fixes failed — it may simply mean the crawl that reflects those changes has not completed yet. Allow at least one full crawl cycle before evaluating the impact of your optimizations.

## **What Is OTTO Authority Building and Why Does It Show 0?**

OTTO Authority Building is a separate set of off-page SEO tools designed to increase your domain authority. A score of **0** in Authority Building means no Authority Building campaigns or assets have been created yet for your project. It is not an error — it is a starting point.

Authority Building does not affect your on-page Site Audit score directly. It improves your domain's overall authority over time, which supports higher rankings and long-term score improvements across your project.

## **How to Get Started With Authority Building**

To begin using Authority Building features, navigate to the left sidebar → Authority (Press Releases) within Search Atlas and start creating campaigns or assets for your project. If you are unsure which Authority Building features are available on your plan, review your account's feature access within the platform settings.

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.