🔍 What Is the Search Atlas Score?
The Search Atlas score (displayed as a value out of 100) is a composite metric that reflects your website's overall SEO health. A dramatic drop in this score — such as falling to 1/100 — usually signals one or more underlying issues that need attention. This article covers the most common reasons scores drop and practical steps you can take to investigate and improve your score.
⚠️ Why Did Your Score Drop Dramatically?
A sudden, steep drop in your Search Atlas score is typically tied to one or more detectable issues. Common contributing factors include:
- New or recently crawled site with thin content: If your site was just added to Search Atlas or recently re-crawled, the tool may be seeing very little published content, resulting in a near-zero baseline score.
- Large number of orphaned pages: Pages that have no internal links pointing to them signal poor site architecture and can weigh heavily on your score.
- Critical technical errors: Broken links, missing meta tags, or slow page speed can all negatively affect your score.
- Site under active development: If your site is being rebuilt or restructured, incomplete pages or temporary redirects can distort the score significantly.
🗂️ What Are Orphaned Pages?
Orphaned pages are pages on your website that exist in your sitemap or have been crawled, but receive no internal links from any other page on your site. Because no other page links to them, search engine bots may struggle to discover and index them — and users cannot navigate to them organically.
Orphaned pages are a common cause of score drops because they signal disorganised site architecture. To address them:
- Open your site audit results in Search Atlas by going to OTTO SEO → Site Audit in the left sidebar and look for any pages flagged as orphaned.
- For each orphaned page, identify where it logically belongs in your site structure and add an internal link to it from a relevant parent or sibling page.
- If a page has no content value, consider removing it or redirecting it to a relevant page.
- Re-run the site audit after making changes to confirm the orphaned pages have been resolved.
🛠️ General Steps to Investigate and Improve Your Score
If your score has dropped and you are unsure why, work through the following steps:
- Open Search Atlas and navigate to OTTO SEO → Site Audit in the left sidebar to review your site audit results and any flagged issues.
- Prioritise fixing errors listed as critical or high-impact first — these typically have the greatest effect on your overall score.
- Address orphaned pages, broken links, and missing metadata before moving on to lower-priority items.
- If your site is currently under development, be aware that incomplete content and structural changes can temporarily lower your score — this is expected and should improve once the site is more complete.
- After making fixes, trigger a new crawl or audit from OTTO SEO → Site Audit in the left sidebar of Search Atlas to see your updated score.
📋 When to Contact Support
If you have reviewed your audit results, addressed the flagged issues, and your score has not improved as expected, our support team can help investigate further. When reaching out, please have the following ready:
- Your project or domain name as it appears in Search Atlas
- A description of when the score drop occurred and approximately how large the drop was
- Any specific error messages or flagged issues shown in your audit results
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.