If your account was downgraded or a subscription lapsed, one or more of your OTTO or Site Auditor projects may appear as frozen. These projects still occupy a plan slot but cannot be used. Deleting them frees those slots so you can create new, active projects.

❄️ What Is a Frozen Project?

A project becomes frozen when your current plan no longer includes enough slots to cover all existing projects — typically after a downgrade or cancellation. Frozen projects remain visible in your dashboard but are completely inactive. They count against your slot limit and will not unfreeze on their own.

Note: In some cases a frozen OTTO project may also be in a deep-frozen state — for example, if it is still linked to an active OTTO client. Deep-frozen projects cannot be deleted through the dashboard at this time. If you attempt to delete a frozen project and receive an error, or if the project does not have a delete option, please contact support via the chat widget (see below).

🗑️ How to Delete a Frozen OTTO Project

1. Open OTTO SEO from the left sidebar in your Search Atlas dashboard (Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites).
2. Locate the frozen project in your OTTO project list.
3. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) on the project card.
4. Select Delete Project or Remove Site.
5. Confirm the deletion when prompted.

After deletion, the freed slot may take up to 24 hours to reflect in your quota count. If your slot count does not update right away, refresh the page and allow up to 24 hours for the change to fully process.

🔍 How to Delete a Frozen Site Auditor Project

1. Go to Site Auditor in the left sidebar (Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites).
2. Find the frozen project in your project list.
3. Click the kebab menu (⋮) or the project settings icon.
4. Select Delete or Remove.
5. Confirm the deletion when prompted.

After deletion, the freed slot may take up to 24 hours to reflect in your quota count.

⚠️ Important: What Happens After Deletion

• Deletion is permanent. All audit history, OTTO deployments, suggestions, and configuration are gone and cannot be restored.
• OTTO changes on your live website are not automatically removed. If OTTO deployed schema markup or NLP modules to your site, those changes remain live until you remove them manually — by uninstalling the WordPress plugin or deleting the OTTO JavaScript snippet from your site's code.
• Frozen projects will not unfreeze on their own. To keep a project without deleting it, you must upgrade to a plan that supports the additional slot.
• Slot counts may take up to 24 hours to update in your dashboard after deletion. This is a known platform delay; a page refresh may show the updated count sooner, but full propagation can take up to 24 hours.
• Some frozen projects cannot be deleted from the dashboard. If a frozen project is linked to an active OTTO client (deep-frozen state), the delete option may be unavailable or return an error. Contact our support team using the chat widget below to have the slot manually freed.

💬 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.