🔍 Overview
Some customers notice that Site Audit crawls or OTTO AI agent tasks start but never seem to finish. In most cases the job is still running — it is processing in the background and will complete. This article explains the common causes, what to check, and how to keep things moving.
⚙️ Why Tasks Appear Stuck
There are several known reasons a Site Audit or OTTO task may look frozen:
- JavaScript rendering slows crawls significantly. When JS rendering is enabled, audits can take up to 13–17 hours to complete. This is expected behaviour, not a bug. The crawl progress bar may appear idle for long periods.
- Worker interruption during retry. If a background worker pod is restarted while a task is retrying, the job can enter an in_progress state that does not resolve on its own. This requires a manual refresh or re-trigger.
- Recrawl frequency set to "never reprocess". If a site's recrawl frequency was not set correctly, the audit will not queue a new crawl. It will appear stuck because no reprocess is scheduled.
- Orphaned reprocess tasks. In rare cases, an internal reprocess task becomes detached from the main audit job. The status reads "still processing" indefinitely until the orphaned task is cleared.
🚀 Steps to Resolve a Stuck Task
- Go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) (URL:
/seo-automation-v3). - Locate the affected site or project. Check the current status label — if it shows in_progress or still processing for more than 18 hours, the task may need a manual reset.
- Click Refresh data on the project dashboard. This triggers a status sync and can resolve misread processing states.
- If the audit does not update after refreshing, open the project and use the Create Project option to re-initiate a fresh audit run for the affected domain.
- If you recently enabled JS rendering and the audit has been running for fewer than 17 hours, wait for the crawl to complete before taking further action. JS-rendered audits are significantly slower by design.
📊 Check Your Recrawl Frequency Setting
A missing or incorrect recrawl frequency is a common hidden cause of audits that never restart. To verify your setting:
- Go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation).
- Select the affected site.
- Review the crawl schedule or recrawl frequency setting. If it is set to never reprocess, update it to your preferred frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly).
- Save the change and trigger a manual crawl to confirm the audit queues correctly.
💡 A Note on Regulated Industry Instructions (FDA and Similar)
If you have added compliance instructions — such as FDA advertising guidelines — to your OTTO or AI agent workflow, it is important to understand how the agent reads and applies those instructions:
- OTTO and the AI agent process your custom instructions on a per-task basis. If a task was already queued or cached before you added the instructions, it may complete using the previous configuration.
- To ensure compliance rules are applied, add your instructions before starting a new task. Do not rely on mid-run instruction changes affecting tasks already in progress.
- After saving compliance instructions, trigger a fresh audit or task run so the agent picks up the updated configuration from the start.
- Always review AI-generated suggestions before publishing. The AI agent surfaces recommendations based on SEO best practices. You are responsible for verifying that any content or metadata changes meet your regulatory requirements before they go live.
Search Atlas does not validate suggestions against specific regulatory frameworks such as FDA, HIPAA, or FTC guidelines. Compliance review remains the responsibility of your team.
🛠️ When to Contact Support
Reach out if:
- A task has been stuck for more than 18 hours and a manual refresh or re-trigger has not resolved it.
- Your compliance instructions are consistently being ignored across multiple fresh task runs.
- You see an audit looping between queued and in_progress repeatedly without completing.
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.