🧭 Overview

After deploying on-page fixes through OTTO, you may notice that the changes don't appear immediately inside the platform — or that OTTO still shows outdated content such as old meta descriptions, blog posts, or a previous site icon. This is almost always caused by a crawl delay, not a deployment failure. This article explains why this happens and what you can do to speed up the process.

⚙️ Why Does This Happen?

OTTO relies on its site crawler to read your live website and update the data it displays inside the platform. When you deploy a fix, the change goes live on your site right away — but OTTO's display won't update until the crawler revisits your pages and pulls in the new data. Several factors can slow this down:

• Large websites: Sites with many pages take longer to fully re-crawl.
• Crawl queue: During high-demand periods, your site may be queued behind other crawl requests.
• Server response time: If your hosting server responds slowly, the crawler takes longer to process each page.
• Caching layers: CDN or server-side caches may serve the old version of your page to the crawler even after you've updated your site.

This is a known platform behaviour. Your fixes are live on your website — OTTO's dashboard simply needs time to catch up and reflect them.

✅ How to Confirm Your Fixes Are Already Live

Before taking any action inside OTTO, verify that your changes are actually live on the front end:

1. Open your browser and navigate to the affected page.
2. Right-click the page and select View Page Source.
3. Search for the specific element you changed (e.g., meta title, meta description, alt tag, or H1).
4. If your updated content appears in the source code, the fix is live — OTTO just hasn't re-crawled it yet.

You can also open the page in a private/incognito window to bypass your local browser cache and confirm the live version.

🛠️ Steps to Refresh OTTO's Data

Follow these steps to prompt OTTO to re-crawl your site and update its displayed data:

1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) to open the OTTO dashboard.
2. Locate your connected website and open its OTTO session.
3. Look for the Re-crawl or Refresh Site option within the session controls and click it.
4. Allow the crawl to complete — this can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on your site size.
5. Once the crawl finishes, return to the OTTO dashboard and check whether your fixes are now reflected.

If you have a caching plugin (such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache) or a CDN (such as Cloudflare), clear your cache before triggering the re-crawl. This ensures the crawler sees the most up-to-date version of your pages.

⏱️ How Long Should I Wait?

Crawl times vary based on site size and server performance. As a general guide:

• Small sites (under 50 pages): Typically update within 15–60 minutes.
• Medium sites (50–500 pages): May take 1–4 hours.
• Large sites (500+ pages): Can take several hours or longer.

If more than 24 hours have passed since you triggered a re-crawl and your fixes still aren't showing inside OTTO, proceed to the next section.

🚩 When to Contact Support

Reach out to our team if any of the following apply:

• Your fixes are confirmed live in your page source but OTTO hasn't updated after 24+ hours.
• The re-crawl appears to be stuck or never completes.
• Specific elements such as your site icon, blog posts, or structured data are consistently not being picked up despite multiple re-crawl attempts.
• Your OTTO session shows fixes as Deployed but the frontend of your site does not reflect them at all.

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

Test page speed via Google PageSpeed Insights: score below 50 or TTFB above 600ms indicates crawl impact. Check server response with GTmetrix/Pingdom — above 1–2 seconds can cause crawler timeouts on content-heavy pages.