🔍 What Is Happening and Why
OTTO determines the language of each page by reading the HTML lang attribute at crawl time. If your Spanish pages have <html lang="en"> in their markup, OTTO interprets them as English pages and generates suggestions in English — regardless of the actual content on the page or any settings in Brand Vault.
This is the most common reason bilingual or multilingual sites receive suggestions in the wrong language. It can also cause your OTTO score to appear stuck or metrics to stop updating, because suggestions generated in the wrong language may not apply correctly to the page.
✅ How to Fix It
- Identify the affected pages. Check the source code of your Spanish pages and look for the opening
<html>tag. If it reads<html lang="en">, that is the root cause. - Update the lang attribute. Ask your developer to change the
langattribute on all Spanish pages to<html lang="es">. For regional variants, use the appropriate BCP 47 tag (for example,lang="es-MX"for Mexican Spanish orlang="es-ES"for Spanish from Spain). - Re-crawl your site in OTTO. After the code change is deployed, trigger a new scan in OTTO so it picks up the corrected language signal and regenerates suggestions in Spanish.
- Verify the new suggestions. Once the crawl completes, review the updated suggestions for your Spanish pages to confirm they are now generated in Spanish.
⚠️ Why Brand Vault Settings Do Not Override This
Brand Vault stores information about your brand, tone, and preferences, but it does not override the page-level language signal. OTTO relies on the lang attribute in the HTML of each individual page to determine which language to use for suggestions. The fix must be applied at the HTML level by your developer.
🏗️ Long-Term Recommendation for Bilingual or Multilingual Sites
If you manage a bilingual or multilingual site, the most reliable architecture is to host each language version on a separate subdomain or as a separate project in OTTO. For example:
- English site:
www.example.com→ one OTTO project withlang="en"pages - Spanish site:
es.example.com→ a separate OTTO project withlang="es"pages
This approach ensures OTTO can accurately detect the language for every page in each project and generate targeted, language-correct suggestions without any cross-language interference.
📊 What to Do If Suggestions Are Still Wrong After Re-Crawling
If you have corrected the lang attribute, re-crawled, and OTTO is sti