## 🧭 Overview

After deploying on-page fixes through OTTO, you may notice that the platform still shows old data — outdated meta tags, missing blog posts, an incorrect site icon, or SEO scores that haven't improved. This is almost always caused by a slow-loading website preventing Search Atlas's crawler from fully scanning your pages, not a sync issue with your CMS or content tool.

This article explains what causes stale OTTO data, how to confirm it is a crawl speed problem, and the steps to resolve it.



## ⚠️ Why This Happens

Search Atlas crawls your website to read live on-page data and verify that deployed fixes are in place. If your site loads slowly, the crawler may time out before it can retrieve a page's content. When this happens:

- OTTO continues to display the last successfully crawled version of your data.
- Fixes you have deployed appear undetected, even though they are live on your site.
- Elements like blog posts, site icons, and meta descriptions may not match what a visitor sees in a browser.

This symptom is commonly mistaken for a CMS sync gap or a content ingestion error, but the root cause is page performance, not a platform configuration problem.



## 🔍 How to Confirm a Crawl Speed Issue

Before troubleshooting, confirm that slow site performance is the likely cause by checking the following:

1. **Test your page speed.** Open Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your domain. A score below 50 on mobile or desktop, or a Time to First Byte (TTFB) above 600 ms, indicates your site is slow enough to affect crawlers.
2. **Check your hosting server response.** Use a tool such as GTmetrix or Pingdom to measure server response time. Anything above 1–2 seconds can cause crawler timeouts on content-heavy pages.
3. **Confirm fixes are live in a browser.** Visit the affected pages directly in an incognito browser window and verify your deployed changes are visible. If they appear correctly in a browser but not in OTTO, the issue is crawl-side, not deployment-side.

## 🛠️ Steps to Resolve the Issue

1. **Improve your site's load time.** Work with your developer or hosting provider to reduce page load time. Common fixes include enabling caching, compressing images, using a CDN, and minimising render-blocking scripts. The goal is a TTFB under 400 ms and a full page load under 3 seconds.
2. **Allow time for re-crawling.** Once performance improvements are in place, Search Atlas will re-crawl your site on its next scheduled cycle. After the crawl completes, OTTO should reflect your deployed fixes accurately.
3. **Contact support if data remains stale.** If your site speed has improved and OTTO still shows outdated data after a reasonable period, reach out to the Search Atlas support team so they can investigate the crawl status for your domain directly.

If you need further assistance, please contact our support team via the chat widget in your Search Atlas dashboard.