🔍 Overview
OTTO SEO builds its suggestions from the content already on your website. Some customers notice two things: their personal name appears in suggested titles, descriptions, or alt text, and some alt text suggestions look cut off. This article explains why both happen and what you can do about them.
🧐 Why Your Name Appears in OTTO Suggestions
OTTO reads the text and headings on your pages, plus the business name and author name saved in the project's Knowledge Graph, so a name can show up in a suggestion when it appears in one of these places:
- The author name saved in the project's Knowledge Graph, or a name written in the page text that OTTO crawled.
- Your business or brand name, especially if it includes your own name (for example, a personal brand or a practice named after you).
- Any crawled page whose text mentions you prominently, including About, Contact, and team pages.
- Existing titles and descriptions that already include your name.
- Text near the image on the page, or the page summary, when it contains your name.
In many cases this is intended. Including a brand name in a page title is a common SEO practice. If you would rather not have your name appear, you can control it.
✅ How to Keep Names Out of Suggestions
- Review before you approve. Check each suggestion and edit the text to remove your name before accepting or publishing it.
- Check the source. If your name keeps coming back, look at the page it came from. Bylines, image captions, and file names are common sources.
- If you change the wording on your page, such as swapping a personal byline for your company name, recrawl the site and regenerate the suggestions. Also update the author name in the project's Knowledge Graph if it is saved there.
- Rename images. If a file name contains your name, upload a version with a descriptive name that describes the image instead.
- Add your own instruction in OTTO Settings under Additional AI instructions, for example "Never use the name [REDACTED]." It applies to future suggestions, up to 1,000 characters, and it guides the wording rather than guaranteeing the name is removed. Check each new suggestion before you approve it.
✂️ Why Alt Text Can Look Truncated
Alt text describes an image for screen readers and search engines. Good alt text is short and to the point, usually around 125 characters or fewer. Suggestions can look cut off for a few reasons:
- Length limits. Long descriptions may be shortened to keep alt text concise.
- Long generated descriptions are shortened to about 15 words, or about 5 words for a logo.
- The stored suggestion is already the shortened text. A long value may be clipped by the width of the list, but opening it shows the full stored text.
🛠️ How to Fix Truncated Alt Text
- Open the suggestion and read the full stored text. If it ends abruptly, the description was shortened when it was created, so edit it into a complete phrase before you approve it.
- Rewrite it manually. Describe what is in the image in one clear sentence, ending with a complete thought.
- Put the key detail first. If any part is trimmed, the most important words will still be there.
- Skip filler. Avoid phrases like "image of" or "picture of," and do not stuff in keywords.
- Check your result. After you save, confirm the full alt text appears on the page.
💡 Best Practices
- Use your brand name where it helps people recognize your business, and keep personal names out of alt text unless the image shows that person.
- Keep alt text specific, for example "Plumber repairing a kitchen sink," rather than generic.
- Review suggestions in batches so you can spot repeated patterns, such as a name appearing across many pages.
- Give images descriptive file names before uploading.
💬 Still Need Help?
If your name keeps appearing in suggestions, or alt text still looks cut off after you have tried the steps above, we can help. If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be instantly connected with a member of our team. To help us resolve it faster, tell us the page URL, the suggestion text, and the name you want excluded.