📊 Understanding Holistic Pillar Authority Scores

The Holistic Pillars feature inside the OTTO SEO tool measures the topical authority of your website across key content pillars. Each pillar is scored across Content, Authority, and UX signals, and the Authority Score reflects how strongly your site demonstrates expertise on that topic, based on crawled content, indexed pages, and connected data sources.

Because these scores draw on several data sources, they update on a schedule rather than instantly. If you have recently published content or fixed an issue, the score you see may still reflect a previous crawl. This is the most common reason customers believe the data is incorrect.

🔍 Why Your Scores May Look Incorrect or Outdated

Before reporting a problem, it helps to know the typical causes of inaccurate or stale Authority Scores:

• Pending data refresh: Scores recalculate on a regular cycle. Recent changes may not yet appear.
• Disconnected integrations: If Google Search Console or Google Analytics has lost its connection, the tool cannot pull current performance data.
• Incorrect project settings: A wrong domain, location, or language in your project can pull data for the wrong site or market.
• Crawl restrictions: Pages blocked by robots.txt, noindex tags, or login walls cannot be read, lowering the score.
• Cached browser data: Your browser may be displaying an old version of the dashboard.
• New or low-content pillars: Pillars with few supporting pages naturally show lower scores until more content is added.
• Dashboard vs. AI Agent figures: A score shown in the AI Agent or in a generated report may temporarily differ from the dashboard while data is syncing across views. This can also affect related metrics such as AI Visibility (formerly LLM Visibility) and Sentiment.​

🛠️ Steps to Refresh and Verify Your Data​

Work through these steps in order. Most score issues are resolved within the first few checks.

1. Confirm project settings: Open your project and verify the domain, target country, and language are correct.
2. Check your integrations: Make sure Google Search Console and Google Analytics are connected and authorized. Reconnect any that show an error.
3. Refresh the data: Use the refresh or re-crawl option within the OTTO SEO tool to request an updated calculation.
4. Clear your cache: Log out, clear your browser cache, then log back in. You can also test in an incognito or private window.
5. Allow time to process: After requesting a refresh, give the system time to recrawl and recalculate before reviewing the scores again.
6. Compare against the source: Cross-check the figures with your connected Search Console data to confirm whether the difference is real or a display delay.​

⏱️ How Often Scores Update​

Authority Scores are recalculated on a recurring schedule, not in real time. After publishing new content, improving existing pages, or fixing a technical issue, expect to wait through at least one full refresh cycle before the change is reflected. Repeatedly requesting refreshes in a short period will not speed up the process and may reset the timer.

🐞 Known Issues We've Resolved​

If your scores look wrong, check whether your situation matches one of the issues below. These were previously reported by customers and have since been fixed, so the first step is to request a refresh and confirm you are on the latest data:

• Scores stuck at or dropping to 0: Content, Authority, and UX signals showing 0 — including an Authority Score dropping to 0 after a weekly analysis — even while a site scan was active. This occurred in cases where the primary data API returned 0 with no fallback in place. These issues have been resolved.
• Score showing 100/100 incorrectly: An Authority Score reading 100% on a new domain with no activity, or on pillars made up mostly of platform-generated content (including in AI Agent V2). This has been corrected.
• Dashboard, AI Agent, and report mismatches: Discrepancies where the dashboard, the AI Agent results, and Report Builder showed different values for the same metrics — including AI Visibility (formerly LLM Visibility) and Sentiment, and discrepancies noticed during Agentic Onboarding when comparing against the dashboard. Related Report Builder report delivery problems were also fixed. These data-consistency issues have been addressed.​

If you still see any of these behaviors after a full refresh cycle, report it to our team so we can check your specific project.
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💡 Tips to Keep Scores Accurate​

• Keep your integrations connected and re-authorize them whenever you change Google account passwords.
• Ensure important pages are crawlable and not blocked by noindex or robots.txt rules.
• Maintain consistent project settings so the tool always reads the correct domain and market.
• Build out each pillar with relevant, high-quality content to strengthen its score over time.
• Review scores after a full refresh cycle rather than immediately after making changes.