🔍 What Is the OTTO Optimization Score?
The OTTO Optimization Score is a percentage that reflects how well your website has implemented OTTO's AI-driven SEO recommendations. A higher score means more recommendations have been applied, giving your site a stronger foundation for ranking in search results. The score updates automatically as OTTO detects changes on your site or generates new tasks.
📉 Why Did My Score Decrease?
A drop in your Optimization Score — for example, from 68 to 63 — does not always mean something went wrong. Here are the most common reasons your score may decrease:
- New recommendations added: OTTO continuously audits your site. When it identifies new SEO issues or opportunities, those are added to your task list. More open tasks mean a lower percentage of completed work, which reduces the score.
- Previously applied changes were reversed: If a page was edited, a plugin updated a meta tag, or a CMS change overwrote OTTO's optimizations, those tasks may revert to an incomplete state.
- Site content changes: Publishing new pages or posts introduces fresh content that OTTO needs to evaluate, adding new tasks to the queue.
- Technical issues detected: OTTO may flag newly discovered technical problems such as broken links, missing schema, or slow-loading pages.
A score decrease is a signal to act, not a cause for alarm. It simply means OTTO has found more ways to improve your site.
🛠️ How to Increase Your OTTO Score
Follow these steps to review and complete your open recommendations inside Search Atlas.
- Open OTTO SEO: In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation). This takes you to the OTTO dashboard where all your active sites and scores are displayed.
- Select your site: Click on the site whose score you want to improve. You will see a breakdown of pending tasks grouped by category — for example, On-Page, Technical, and Content.
- Sort by impact: Prioritise tasks marked as High Impact first. Completing these moves the needle on your score the most and delivers the greatest SEO benefit.
- Apply recommendations: Click Deploy or Apply next to each task. OTTO can push many changes directly to your site when the Search Atlas WordPress plugin is installed and connected. For tasks that require manual edits, follow the on-screen instructions.
- Review content suggestions: Navigate to OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Page Explorer to find page-level recommendations. Update title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and body content as suggested.
- Check technical tasks: Address any flagged technical issues such as missing canonical tags, broken internal links, or absent structured data. These often account for a significant portion of the score.
- Re-scan your site: After applying changes, click Re-Analyze or wait for OTTO's next automatic crawl. Your score will update once the changes are confirmed.
💡 Tips to Maintain a High Score
- Connect the Search Atlas WordPress plugin so OTTO can deploy on-page changes automatically without manual edits.
- Check your OTTO dashboard weekly to catch new recommendations before they accumulate and lower your score.
- Avoid overwriting OTTO changes in your CMS manually, as this can revert completed tasks back to open status.
- Focus on completing all tasks in one category before moving to the next — this creates a clean, measurable lift in your score.
- Use Site Metrics (left sidebar → Site Metrics) to track keyword rankings alongside your score, so you can correlate optimizations with ranking improvements over time.
📊 Understanding What a Good Score Looks Like
There is no universal benchmark, but as a general guide:
- Below 50%: Significant opportunities remain. Focus on high-impact tasks immediately.
- 50–75%: Solid progress. Continue working through remaining recommendations systematically.
- 76–90%: Strong optimization. Maintain the score by reviewing new tasks regularly.
- 91–100%: Excellent. Your site is closely aligned with OTTO's best-practice recommendations. Monitor for new tasks as your content grows.
Remember that OTTO's recommendations evolve with your site, so even a perfect score today may drop slightly tomorrow as new content or issues are detected. This is normal and expected behavior.
🆘 Need More Help?
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.