🗺️ Overview
If your website serves multiple languages through subdirectories — for example, /pl/ for Polish, /fr/ for French, or /en/ for English — you may want to deploy OTTO to just one language version at a time. This article explains how OTTO handles multilingual sites, what to expect, and the recommended approach for isolating OTTO to a specific subdirectory.
⚙️ How OTTO Scopes a Project
When you create an OTTO project, it is tied to the root domain you enter during setup. OTTO crawls and applies optimisations across the entire domain by default — it does not automatically restrict itself to a single subdirectory such as /pl/.
Because of this, deploying OTTO to a multilingual site without any configuration adjustments means OTTO will discover and potentially act on pages across all language versions of your site, not just one.
🚫 Known Limitation: Subdirectory-Only Scoping
At this time, OTTO does not support a built-in subdirectory scope selector that restricts crawling and automation exclusively to a path like /pl/. A dedicated subdirectory scope UI is planned for a future release. Until that feature is available, the approaches below are the recommended ways to isolate OTTO to a single language version.
✅ Recommended Approaches
Choose the method that best fits your technical setup and testing goals:
- Create a separate OTTO project for the target subdirectory domain: If your multilingual setup uses a subdomain structure (e.g., pl.example.com), create a dedicated OTTO project using that subdomain as the root domain. This gives you clean, isolated coverage for that language.
- Use URL filtering during onboarding: When setting up your OTTO project, enter the full subdirectory URL as the starting point (e.g., https://www.example.com/pl/). This signals to the crawler where to begin, which can limit the initial scope of discovered pages — though full root-level isolation is not guaranteed.
- Apply OTTO recommendations selectively: After OTTO generates suggestions, review them page by page and apply changes only to pages that belong to your target language subdirectory. Avoid bulk-deploying suggestions if you have not yet verified the language scope of each page.
- Monitor language attribution carefully: A known issue exists where AI suggestions may be generated in the wrong language on multilingual sites — for example, English-language suggestions appearing on French or Polish pages. Always review suggestion language before deploying, especially on mixed-language domains.
🛠️ Setting Up Your OTTO Project
Follow these steps to create a new OTTO project:
- In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation).
- Click Create to start a new project.
- Enter the domain or subdirectory URL you want OTTO to focus on.
- Complete the setup wizard, paying close attention to any crawl settings that allow you to narrow the starting URL path.
- Once the project is active, review the discovered pages and confirm they match the language version you intend to optimise.
💡 Best Practices for Multilingual Sites
- Audit before deploying: Always run a full page review after OTTO crawls your site to confirm which language pages were discovered.
- Check suggestion language: Read each AI-generated suggestion to verify it matches the target language of the page before applying it.
- One project per language: Where your site architecture allows, consider maintaining one OTTO project per language region. This makes performance tracking cleaner and reduces the risk of cross-language errors.
- Use hreflang correctly: Ensure your site's hreflang tags are properly implemented. Well-structured hreflang helps OTTO and other tools correctly identify language and regional intent for each page.
🔮 What's Coming
The Search Atlas team is actively working on expanded subdirectory scope controls for OTTO, which will allow you to restrict crawling and automation to a specific path such as /pl/ or /fr/ directly within the project settings. This feature is on the product roadmap and will be announced in release notes when available.
💬 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.