🔍 What Is a Stalled OTTO Recrawl?
When OTTO runs a recrawl, it scans your website to refresh audit data and generate updated SEO suggestions. In most cases, a recrawl completes within a few hours. If your recrawl has been running for more than 24 hours without finishing, it is considered stalled. This can happen due to a processing loop, an orphaned reprocess task, or a missing staleness guard that normally resets stuck jobs automatically.
⚠️ Common Causes
- Async task loop: The recrawl job enters a repeated "still processing" state and never exits.
- Orphaned reprocess task: A background task loses its connection to the crawl job and keeps running silently.
- Missing recrawl frequency setting: Some audits were previously set to "never reprocess," which prevented automatic restarts.
- Spinner never clears: The UI shows a loading spinner indefinitely, even though the underlying job has stalled.
🧭 How to Check Your Recrawl Status
- In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then select All Sites.
- Find your website in the list and check the recrawl status indicator next to it.
- Click on your site to open its detail view, then navigate to Crawl Monitoring in the left sidebar under OTTO SEO.
- Review the crawl log for the most recent entry. If the status reads "processing" or "still processing" and the timestamp is older than 24 hours, the recrawl is stalled.
- You can also go to All Audits to confirm whether audit data or suggestions appear outdated or missing.
🛠️ Steps to Attempt Recovery
- Go to OTTO SEO → All Sites in the left sidebar.
- Select the checkbox next to your stalled site.
- Click Scan at the top of the page to trigger a fresh crawl manually.
- Wait 10–15 minutes, then return to Crawl Monitoring to verify the new crawl has started and the previous stalled status has cleared.
- If the spinner is still visible and no progress is shown after 30 minutes, do not trigger additional scans — multiple overlapping jobs can worsen the issue.
📊 What to Expect After a Successful Restart
Once the crawl resumes correctly, you will see the status update in Crawl Monitoring and new audit data will appear under All Audits. OTTO suggestions including title tag recommendations and on-page fixes will regenerate automatically. Depending on your site size, this can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours.
💡 How to Prevent Stalled Recrawls
- Avoid triggering multiple manual scans in quick succession — let each scan complete before starting another.
- Check Crawl Monitoring regularly if you have a large site, as bigger crawls are more prone to timeout issues.
- If you notice suggestions are not updating even though no crawl appears to be running, use the Scan button to kick off a fresh recrawl rather than waiting for the automatic schedule.
🆘 When to Contact Support
If your recrawl remains stalled after following the steps above, or if triggering a new scan does not resolve the issue, our team can investigate and manually clear the orphaned task on the backend. 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.
When reaching out, please have the following ready to speed up the investigation: your website URL, the approximate time the recrawl started, and a screenshot of the Crawl Monitoring page showing the stalled status.