🔍 Overview
If your Site Audit is not picking up changes you made in Search Atlas — or you are seeing a Google Rich Results error or a CORS policy error blocking resource access — this article will explain why these issues occur and walk you through the steps to resolve them.
⚙️ Why Your Site Audit May Not Reflect Recent Changes
Search Atlas Site Audits crawl your live website. This means the audit can only detect changes that have already been published and deployed to your site. Changes made inside Search Atlas (such as optimised meta tags, structured data, or content edits) will not appear in a new audit until they are pushed live on your actual website.
Common reasons your audit results appear outdated:
- Changes were saved in Search Atlas but not yet implemented on your website by your developer or CMS.
- Your site uses a caching layer (CDN, server cache, or plugin cache) that is serving an older version of your pages.
- The audit was re-run before your server had fully propagated the updates.
- A previous crawl result is still being displayed — a fresh audit has not been triggered since the changes went live.
🚫 Understanding the CORS Policy Error
A CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) error occurs when your website's server blocks external requests to load certain resources — such as scripts, stylesheets, or fonts — from a different origin. During a Site Audit, Search Atlas crawls your pages and attempts to access linked resources. If your server's CORS headers do not permit these requests, the audit flags the affected resources as inaccessible.
This is a server-side configuration issue on your website, not a Search Atlas platform error. It must be resolved by updating your server or CDN headers to allow the necessary cross-origin requests.
✅ How to Fix Sync Issues (Changes Not Appearing)
- Confirm your changes are live: Open your website in an incognito or private browser window and verify the updates are visible on the published pages.
- Clear your site cache: Purge any caching plugin, CDN cache (such as Cloudflare or Fastly), or server-side cache so the latest version of your pages is served to crawlers.
- Wait for propagation: After publishing and clearing caches, allow at least 15–30 minutes before re-running the audit.
- Run a new Site Audit: Navigate to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Site Audit, locate your project, and trigger a fresh crawl. Do not rely on a cached audit result from before your changes went live.
- Check your implementation: If the audit still does not reflect your changes after a fresh crawl, confirm with your developer that the correct code or meta data was deployed to the production environment, not just a staging server.
✅ How to Fix the CORS Policy Error
- Identify the blocked resources: Review the Site Audit report to note exactly which URLs or resource types are being blocked by the CORS policy.
- Update your server headers: Work with your developer or hosting provider to add the appropriate Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to your server or CDN configuration. For most sites, setting this to * (wildcard) or to the specific origins required will resolve the error.
- Check CDN settings: If you use a CDN such as Cloudflare, check the CORS settings within your CDN dashboard. Some CDNs cache CORS headers separately and may require a cache purge after updating rules.
- Re-run the audit: Once your headers are updated and caches are cleared, trigger a new Site Audit to confirm the CORS errors are resolved.
🌟 How to Fix the Google Rich Results Error
A Google Rich Results error in your audit typically means that structured data (schema markup) on one or more of your pages is missing required fields, contains invalid values, or is not formatted correctly according to Google's specification.
- Identify the affected pages: Review the Site Audit report to find which pages have Rich Results errors and what specific fields are flagged.
- Test your structured data: Copy the page URL and paste it into Google's Rich Results Test tool (search.google.com/test/rich-results) to get a detailed breakdown of the errors.
- Correct the schema markup: Update the structured data on your page to include all required properties for your schema type (e.g., Article, Product, FAQ). Ensure values match the expected format.
- Re-publish and re-audit: Once corrections are live and your cache is cleared, run a fresh Site Audit to confirm the Rich Results errors are resolved.
💡 Tips to Prevent These Issues in the Future
- Always verify changes are deployed to your live production site before running a new audit.
- Set up a cache-clearing workflow as part of your deployment process so crawlers always see the latest version of your pages.
- Validate structured data with Google's Rich Results Test tool before and after making schema changes.
- Ensure your server's CORS headers are configured correctly as a baseline, especially if you use a CDN or third-party resource hosting.
🆘 Still Seeing the Error?
If you have followed all the steps above and your Site Audit is still not reflecting your changes or continues to show CORS or Rich Results errors, 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.