## **🔍 Overview**

OTTO recrawl and Site Audit jobs normally complete within a few hours. If your job has been running for more than 24 hours without finishing, it is likely stuck due to a processing error. This article explains why this happens, what you can do right now, and when to contact support.

## **⚠️ Why Jobs Get Stuck**

Several known issues can cause a recrawl or audit job to stall indefinitely:

- **Status misread:** OTTO incorrectly reads a completed task as still processing, causing it to wait indefinitely for a result that already exists.
- **Orphaned reprocess task:** A background reprocessing task gets detached from its parent job and loops without ever finishing.
- **No staleness guard:** Older jobs lacked a timeout mechanism, so a stuck job had no automatic way to recover.
- **Recrawl frequency not set:** Some audits were missing a recrawl frequency value, which prevented them from progressing through the queue correctly.
- **Image recheck routing:** OTTO image rechecks were not always routed correctly to the Site Audit queue, causing them to stall.

The Search Atlas engineering team has resolved the most common root causes. If your job is still stuck, the steps below will help you recover it manually.

## **🛠️ How to Unstick a Recrawl or Audit Job**

1. **Check the current status.** Go to **Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Audits**. Find the affected site and note how long the job has been running. If it has been more than 24 hours, it is safe to assume it is stuck.
2. **Refresh the job.** On the **All Sites** page (**Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites**), locate your site and click **Scan**. This triggers a fresh crawl request and can override a stalled job.
3. **Wait up to 30 minutes.** After triggering a new scan, allow up to 30 minutes for the status to update. Refresh the page periodically to check for progress.
4. **Check Crawl Monitoring.** Navigate to **Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Crawl Monitoring** to see if the crawl is actively processing URLs. If the counter is moving, the job has recovered.
5. **Review the Overview page.** Go to **Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Overview** to confirm that suggestions and audit results are being generated after the crawl completes.

## **✅ What a Healthy Job Looks Like**

- The crawl status updates within a few minutes of being triggered.
- Crawl Monitoring shows a URL counter actively increasing.
- The audit completes and new suggestions appear in the Overview within a few hours for most sites.
- Sites with very large page counts (thousands of pages) may take longer but should still show visible progress.

## **💡 Tips to Prevent Future Stuck Jobs**

- **Avoid triggering multiple scans in quick succession.** Starting a new scan before the previous one finishes can create conflicting tasks in the queue.
- **Check your site is reachable.** If your website is down or returning errors when OTTO tries to crawl it, the job may stall waiting for a valid response. Confirm your site loads correctly before starting a scan.
- **Keep your OTTO connection active.** A disconnected or improperly installed OTTO may cause audit tasks to fail silently. Refer to **Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Installation Guide** if you need to verify your setup.

## **💬 Still Stuck After Following These Steps?**

If your recrawl or audit job is still not progressing after you have tried the steps above, our team can manually investigate and reset the job on your behalf. 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.

Please have the following information ready to speed up the investigation:

- Your website URL (e.g. sowebdesigns.co.uk)
- The date and time you first noticed the job was stuck
- Any error messages or unusual statuses shown in All Audits or Crawl Monitoring