When you rebuild your website — for example, migrating to a new Shopify theme or launching a completely new site structure — your existing OTTO SEO project will still hold data from the previous build. This means OTTO may surface issues, recommendations, and audit results that no longer apply to your live site.
To fix this, you need to trigger a fresh recrawl so OTTO can discover and analyse your new site from scratch. This article walks you through how to do that.
Make sure the following are true before triggering a recrawl:
Your new website is fully live. The recrawl will crawl whatever is currently published at your domain. If the new build is not yet live, wait until it is.
Your domain is the same. If your domain has changed, you will need to create a new OTTO SEO project rather than recrawling the existing one.
DNS and Cloudflare settings are propagated. If you made infrastructure changes alongside the rebuild, confirm those are fully propagated before crawling.
Navigate to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar.
Select the project associated with your rebuilt website (for example, trendygardenclub.com).
Once inside the project, locate the crawl option for your project and initiate a new crawl of your site.
Wait for the crawl to complete. Crawl times vary depending on the size of your site — most sites complete within a few minutes, though larger sites may take longer.
Once the crawl finishes, OTTO will update all audit results, issues, and recommendations to reflect your new website build.
After a successful recrawl, you can expect the following:
Old issues tied to pages or structures from your previous build will be removed.
New issues specific to your rebuilt site will appear in the audit results.
OTTO's recommendations will reset to reflect the current state of your live site.
In some cases, a recrawl may appear to be still processing for an extended period. If the crawl status has not updated after an unusually long time, try the following:
Refresh the page and check whether the crawl status has updated.
Navigate away from the project and return to it to force a status refresh.
If the crawl still shows as processing after refreshing, attempt to initiate a new recrawl.
If the issue persists, our team can investigate and manually trigger a backend recrawl for your project. When reaching out, please have your project name, domain URL, and a description of when the issue started ready to share. 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.