🧭 Overview
When OTTO's crawler cannot successfully reach your homepage, it fails to initialize a site scan — even if your OTTO pixel is correctly installed in your source code. This creates a confusing situation where your pixel appears in the page HTML but OTTO still reports it as undetected. The root cause is almost always a redirect configuration that blocks the crawler before it can verify the pixel.
⚠️ Why OTTO Requires a Directly Accessible Homepage URL
OTTO's crawler starts every site scan by fetching your homepage URL. For the scan to succeed, that URL must return a valid response without passing through a problematic redirect chain. If the crawler follows a redirect that leads to an unexpected destination, it may fail to complete the crawl or detect your pixel.
Common redirect patterns that can cause this failure include:
- HTTP → HTTPS redirects where the URL saved in OTTO uses http:// but your server forces https://
- Non-www → www redirects (or vice versa) where the saved URL does not match the canonical version of your homepage
- Custom path redirects where the root domain redirects to a subdirectory such as /home or /en/
- Redirect chains combining two or more of the above
🔗 How Redirect Chains Block Crawler Initialization
Each redirect hop adds latency and risk. When a redirect chain leads to a URL outside the registered domain, or otherwise prevents the crawler from reaching the page, the scan may fail. Because the scan never completes, OTTO cannot read your page source — which is why your pixel appears in the source code when you check manually but remains undetected inside the platform.
Think of it this way: you installed the pixel correctly, but OTTO never got close enough to the page to see it.
🩺 Step-by-Step Diagnosis
- Find the URL registered in OTTO. Navigate to your OTTO project and locate the homepage URL that was entered during setup. Note the exact URL, including the protocol (http or https) and whether it includes or excludes www.
- Check what your homepage actually resolves to. Open a new browser tab and paste your registered URL into the address bar. Watch where the browser ends up after all redirects complete. Copy the final URL from the address bar.
- Compare the two URLs. If the registered URL and the final resolved URL are different in any way — protocol, subdomain, trailing slash, or path — you have likely found the source of the crawl failure.
- Update the registered URL in OTTO to match the final resolved URL exactly, so the crawler can reach your homepage without following any redirects.
- Re-trigger the site scan after updating the URL and confirm that OTTO successfully detects your pixel.
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.