Troubleshooting: Other Issues

🐛 Fix OTTO Campaign Creation Success Message Bug

🔍 Fix OTTO SEO Analysis Stuck in Progress

⬇️ Download OTTO Optimization Suggestions for Offline Viewing

🛠️ Fix Delayed OTTO Recommendations

🔍 What delayed generation means OTTO creates recommendations after a site crawl discovers pages and identifies opportunities. A delay means the recommendation job has not completed yet; it does not necessarily indicate that OTTO is broken. The exact issue is usually one of these: - Waiting for crawl discovery: OTTO has not yet found new or changed pages. - Processing delay: The recommendation job is still generating results, especially for bulk requests. - No actionable change: The page is already optimal, so OTTO may have no recommendation to display. - Autopilot timing: Older workflows could wait for the next weekly autopilot cycle instead of generating recommendations after discovery. 📊 Check the recommendation status 1. Open OTTO SEO from the left sidebar. 2. Select All Sites and open the affected site. 3. Review the latest crawl and recommendation activity. 4. Open Crawl Monitoring to confirm whether the crawl completed and whether new pages or changes were discovered. 5. Check the recommendation list for a completed result, a pending job, or an indication that the page is already optimal. 🔄 Refresh the site data If the crawl has completed but recommendations are not visible, go to Home and select Refresh data. Return to OTTO SEO → All Sites and review the site again. Do not repeatedly submit the same request while a job is pending. Duplicate requests can increase processing time and make the status harder to interpret. ⚙️ Request a new generation 1. Confirm that the site is installed and connected under OTTO SEO → Installation Guide. 2. Run a scan from OTTO SEO → All Sites. 3. Wait for the scan to finish and confirm that the target page was discovered. 4. Review the generated recommendations. If the page is already optimized, no change may be suggested. ✅ When no recommendation is an expected result OTTO may identify a page as already optimal. In that case, a recommendation is not missing—the system found no meaningful improvement to make. Minor wording changes are not generated when they are unlikely to improve the page. 🧭 If the issue still appears unresolved Record the site, page URL, scan time, and the status shown in OTTO. Also note whether the crawl completed, whether the page was discovered, and whether the result says it is already optimal. This information helps distinguish a pending job from a completed no-op result or a platform issue. 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.

🔄 Reconnect OTTO After Migration

🔄 When to follow these steps Use this guide after moving your site to a new server, changing hosting providers, updating DNS, switching from Cloudflare, or reinstalling OTTO on WordPress. A connected plugin alone does not complete the migration process. After the move, you must recrawl the site and manually reprocess OTTO so it can use the current site configuration. ✅ Confirm the new site is ready 1. Confirm the domain resolves to the new server. 2. Open the live website and verify that key pages load correctly. 3. Confirm WordPress is installed and the OTTO plugin is active on the new site. 4. Check that the site uses the correct HTTPS version and preferred domain. 5. Review the OTTO installation instructions in OTTO SEO → Installation Guide if the plugin was reinstalled or its installation method changed. 🔌 Check the OTTO connection Open OTTO SEO → All Sites and select the affected site. Review its current connection status and confirm that the site is associated with the correct WordPress installation. If the connection was removed during the migration, follow the available installation or connection instructions for the site. Do not treat a successful connection check as the final migration step. 🕷️ Recrawl the site 1. Go to OTTO SEO → Overview. 2. Select the affected site. 3. Choose Scan to start a new crawl. 4. Wait for the crawl to finish before continuing. You can review crawl activity in OTTO SEO → Crawl Monitoring. A new crawl helps OTTO read the current version of the site after the server or hosting change. ⚙️ Manually reprocess OTTO After the recrawl is complete, manually reprocess OTTO for the affected site using the available site actions in OTTO SEO → All Sites or OTTO SEO → Overview. This step is required after the migration. It refreshes OTTO's processing for the newly crawled site and should be completed even when the plugin connection appears active. 🔍 Verify the result - Confirm the site is listed under the correct OTTO site entry. - Check that the latest crawl reflects the new server and current pages. - Review Crawl Monitoring for errors or incomplete activity. - Verify that OTTO recommendations or changes are associated with the current installation. - Run another scan or reprocess only if the first operation did not complete. 🛠️ If the site still does not work Review the domain, HTTPS settings, WordPress installation, and OTTO installation method again. If the site was duplicated, make sure you are working with the correct OTTO site record and not an older entry. 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.

🛠️ Fix Stuck OTTO Trial Activation

🔍 What causes this issue? Your OTTO trial activation can get stuck while it is setting up your OTTO project. Until that activation finishes, the OTTO connection in WordPress cannot be completed, so the plugin connection will keep failing even if you retry it. The blocker is the incomplete activation, not your WordPress setup itself. ✅ What to do first 1. Allow the OTTO trial activation for your website to finish in Search Atlas before attempting the WordPress connection. 2. Do not start multiple trial activations or projects for the same website while one is still in progress, as this can make it harder to identify the correct project later. 3. Once the trial activation has fully completed, return to the OTTO plugin in WordPress and retry the connection. ⚠️ If the activation stays stuck A trial activation that remains stuck typically needs to be investigated and completed by our team rather than resolved entirely from your side. Continuing to retry the WordPress plugin connection while the activation is incomplete will not fix it — the plugin needs a fully activated OTTO project before it can connect successfully. 💬 Information to have ready when you contact us To help us resolve a stuck activation as quickly as possible, please gather the following details before reaching out: - Your website URL and the domain used for the OTTO trial. - The exact message or behavior you see during activation, such as whether it never completes. - The date and time (including your timezone) when you started the trial activation. - Any steps you have already tried, such as retrying the WordPress connection. 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.

🛠️ Troubleshooting Common OTTO SEO Issues

🔍 Overview OTTO SEO automates on-page optimizations across your website. While OTTO is designed to work seamlessly in the background, you may occasionally encounter issues such as schema validation errors, rolled-back changes, or unexpected behavior with generated content. This article walks you through the most common problems and how to resolve them. 🗺️ How to Access OTTO SEO To open OTTO SEO, navigate to the Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → SEO Automation or go directly to /seo-automation-v3 in your platform URL. From this dashboard, you can review active optimizations, check deployment status, and manage OTTO settings for your project. ⚠️ Schema Validation Error: @context Must Use HTTPS One known issue involves a schema validation error where the @context property is set to http://schema.org/ instead of the required https://schema.org/. This can cause your structured data to fail validation in tools like Google's Rich Results Test. To check for this issue: 1. Go to Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → SEO Automation. 2. Review the schema recommendations or deployed schema blocks for your pages. 3. Look for any @context values that begin with http:// rather than https://. If you spot this error, note the affected pages and contact support using the live chat widget. Our team is actively working on a fix to ensure all generated schema uses HTTPS by default. ↩️ OTTO Rolled Back Meta Data or Keyword Optimizations In some cases, OTTO may roll back previously deployed meta data or keyword optimizations. This can happen when a new project sync, audit refresh, or conflicting rule is triggered. If you notice that optimizations have been undone: 1. Open OTTO SEO → SEO Automation from the left sidebar. 2. Review the deployment history or activity log for the affected pages. 3. Check whether a rollback event is recorded and what triggered it. 4. Re-deploy the affected optimizations manually if needed. If the rollback continues to occur or you cannot identify the cause, reach out via the chat widget for escalation. 🖼️ Image Alt Text: Per-Image Updates An OTTO alt-text fix belongs to one specific image, and deploying it updates only that image — not the whole page or project. Keep this in mind when reviewing alt-text suggestions, as each deployment is scoped to the individual image it was generated for. To deploy an alt-text fix: 1. Navigate to Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → SEO Automation. 2. Locate the alt-text suggestion for the specific image you want to update. 3. Deploy the fix and allow OTTO to apply the change to that image. ✍️ Generated Content Issues: Headings, Titles, and Meta Descriptions OTTO's content generation should produce headings, titles, and meta descriptions that match your target language and stay within recommended character limits. Known issues that have been resolved include: - Headings or titles being cut off mid-word. - Open Graph (og:) and Twitter meta tags generating under the recommended length. - Generated content appearing in the wrong language. If you are still experiencing any of these problems, verify that your Brand Vault settings and language preferences are correctly configured. You can access Brand Vault from the OTTO SEO page or On-Page Strategy section. If the modal does not open as expected, try refreshing the page or clearing your browser cache before trying again. ✅ General Troubleshooting Steps Before contacting support, try these steps to resolve most OTTO SEO issues: - Refresh the page — Some display issues resolve on reload. - Clear your browser cache — Cached data can cause outdated information to appear. - Check your project's audit status — An incomplete audit can affect OTTO recommendations. - Review your Brand Vault settings — Incorrect brand or language settings can affect generated content quality. - Re-deploy affected optimizations — If changes were rolled back, manually re-deploying may resolve the issue. 💬 Still Need Help? 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.

🔍 Fix OTTO SEO Score Showing Zero

🤔 Why Is My OTTO SEO Score Showing Zero? If your OTTO SEO score is showing 0 across one or more projects, it almost always means that no SEO fixes have been deployed yet. OTTO calculates your score based on the fixes it has successfully applied to your site — so until at least one fix is deployed, the score will remain at zero. This is expected behaviour for new OTTO activations or projects where fixes are still pending review. It does not mean something is broken. ✅ How OTTO Calculates Your SEO Score Your OTTO SEO score reflects the state of fixes that have been successfully deployed to your website. Here is how the scoring works: - 0 fixes deployed → Score displays as 0 - Some fixes deployed → Score reflects the proportion of completed fixes - All fixes deployed → Score reaches its maximum value for that project OTTO will never show a non-zero score until at least one fix has been actively deployed — this ensures the score is always an accurate reflection of real on-site changes. 🛠️ Steps to Deploy Your OTTO Fixes Follow these steps to deploy fixes and start seeing your score update: 1. Navigate to the OTTO SEO section of the platform and open the project that is showing a score of 0. 2. Check that OTTO has been activated for this project. If you see an activation prompt, complete that step first. 3. Review the list of recommended fixes OTTO has generated for your project. 4. Deploy the available fixes for your project. Your SEO score will update once fixes are confirmed as live. ⚠️ Common Reasons Fixes May Not Be Deploying If you have attempted to deploy fixes but your score is still showing 0, check the following: - OTTO is not activated: OTTO must be fully activated and connected to your site before it can deploy changes. Look for a setup or activation prompt on the project page. - Site connection issue: If OTTO cannot communicate with your website, deployments may fail. Verify that your site integration (WordPress plugin or DNS connection) is active and up to date. - Fixes are pending, not deployed: Reviewing or approving a fix is not the same as deploying it. Make sure you have completed the deployment action — not just selected the fix. - Recently activated project: OTTO may still be crawling and generating recommendations. Allow a few minutes after activation before expecting fixes to appear. 🔄 What to Do After Deploying Fixes After deploying fixes, allow a few minutes for the platform to process the changes and update your score. If your score remains at 0 after deploying fixes, note your project name, any error messages shown, and the approximate time you attempted the deployment before reaching out. 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.

🔧 Fix OTTO SSL Certificate and Subdomain Traffic Issues

Overview OTTO serves optimized content to your website visitors by acting as a proxy layer between your domain and the Search Atlas infrastructure. For this to work correctly, every domain and subdomain connected to OTTO must have a valid SSL certificate. If SSL certificates are missing or misconfigured, OTTO cannot serve traffic on the affected domains, and your SEO automation will not take effect. This article explains the most common causes of SSL and subdomain traffic issues with OTTO and what information to have ready when contacting support. Common Causes of SSL and Traffic Serving Failures - Missing SSL certificate on a subdomain: OTTO requires a valid SSL certificate on every domain and subdomain it serves. If a subdomain (e.g., blog.yourdomain.com or shop.yourdomain.com) does not have an SSL certificate, OTTO will be unable to serve traffic on that subdomain. - Certificate not yet propagated: Newly issued SSL certificates may take time to propagate across DNS. OTTO will not serve traffic until the certificate is fully active and verifiable. - Subdomain not included in OTTO's configuration: If a subdomain was added to your website after OTTO was initially set up, it may not be recognized by OTTO's current configuration. What to Check Before Contacting Support Before escalating, gather the following information so our team can investigate quickly: - The exact domain or subdomain where traffic serving has stopped or SSL errors are appearing - The name of the OTTO project associated with the affected domain - Any error messages you are seeing in your browser or hosting panel - When the issue started and whether any recent changes were made to your domain, DNS settings, or SSL certificate Next Steps Because resolving OTTO SSL certificate and subdomain traffic issues requires our team to inspect your project configuration and certificate status on the backend, there are no self-serve steps that can fully resolve this issue. Please contact support with the details listed above so we can investigate and restore traffic serving as quickly as possible. 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.

OTTO Installation Troubleshooting and Site Optimization Guide

Overview OTTO is Search Atlas's SEO automation tool. When installed correctly, OTTO assists with site optimization without disrupting your site's functionality. However, if you notice 404 errors or network issues after installation, this guide will help you identify whether OTTO is a contributing factor and how to resolve it safely. Does the OTTO Script Cause 404 or Network Errors? In most cases, the OTTO script does not directly cause 404 errors or network failures. These errors are typically related to one of the following pre-existing or unrelated issues: - Missing or broken page URLs on your website - Hosting configuration issues - Plugin or theme conflicts triggered independently of OTTO - DNS propagation delays after recent changes That said, it is worth ruling out OTTO as a contributing factor before taking more drastic steps like restoring your site to a prior version. How to Check If OTTO Is the Cause 1. Temporarily pause OTTO: Log in to Search Atlas and navigate to the OTTO section of the platform. Follow the available options to pause or disable OTTO for your connected site. 2. Clear your browser cache and any caching plugins on your website. 3. Test your site by visiting the affected pages. Check whether the 404 errors or network errors persist. 4. If the errors disappear after pausing OTTO, re-enable it and contact support for further investigation. If the errors remain, OTTO is not the cause and you should investigate your hosting environment. Troubleshooting 404 Errors on Your Site Hosting environments can sometimes produce 404 errors due to configuration issues that are unrelated to third-party scripts. Before restoring your site to a prior version, consider the following general approaches: - Check your site's URL and routing configuration to ensure pages and links are set up correctly. - Review recently installed or updated plugins or extensions that may conflict with your site routing. - Check your hosting provider's server status to confirm there are no active outages affecting your hosting plan. - Consult your hosting provider's support documentation for platform-specific troubleshooting steps relevant to your setup. Should You Restore Your Site to a Prior Version? Restoring your site to a prior version is a last resort and should only be done if all other troubleshooting steps have been exhausted and you have confirmed that OTTO is not the source of the issue. Always create a backup before attempting a restore. Need Help? If you are unsure whether OTTO is contributing to your site issues, or if you have completed the steps above and still cannot resolve the problem, please reach out so our team can investigate further. When escalating, have the following ready: your site URL, the exact error message you are seeing, and the approximate time the issue began. 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.

🔧 Fix Five Common OTTO Configuration Issues

🧭 Overview This article covers five common OTTO configuration issues you may encounter inside Search Atlas. Follow the relevant section below to resolve each problem quickly. ⚙️ 1. OTTO Autopilot Settings Not Saving If your autopilot settings reset after you save them, the most common cause is that the OTTO project is not fully activated. 1. Go to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) in the left sidebar (URL: /seo-automation-v3). 2. Open your OTTO project and check the project status badge at the top of the screen. It must show Active before any settings are persisted. 3. If the project is in Draft or Paused status, click Activate Project and wait for the confirmation banner. 4. Re-enter your autopilot preferences — toggle frequency, task types, and priority rules — then click Save Settings. 5. Refresh the page and confirm the settings are retained. If they reset again, deactivate the project, wait 30 seconds, reactivate it, and repeat the save. Important: Autopilot settings are tied to the active project state. Changes made while a project is paused will not be committed to the system. 🕷️ 2. Product Pages Not Being Indexed by OTTO Crawler OTTO may skip product pages due to crawl rate limits, URL pattern exclusions, or pagination depth settings. 1. Navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) and open the relevant OTTO project. 2. Select the Crawler Settings tab and review the URL Exclusion Patterns list. Remove any patterns that unintentionally match your product page URL structure (for example, patterns containing /products/ or ?variant=). 3. Check the Crawl Depth setting. Product pages nested more than three levels deep may not be reached. Increase the depth limit if needed. 4. Under Rate Limiting, if your store runs on Shopify or a similar platform, enable the E-commerce Crawl Mode toggle. This reduces request frequency to avoid server-side blocking while ensuring full product catalogue coverage. 5. Click Save, then trigger a recrawl using the Recrawl Site button in OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview). 6. Allow up to 24 hours for large catalogues. Monitor progress in the Crawl Log panel. Tip: If products are behind a login or age gate, OTTO cannot crawl them. Ensure the URLs you want indexed are publicly accessible. 🔗 3. GSC Account Not Connecting in OTTO Settings A mismatch between the Google account used for GSC and the account linked to your Search Atlas workspace is the most frequent cause of connection failures. 1. Go to Settings → Integrations in the left sidebar. 2. Under Google Search Console, check which Google account is currently authorised. The email shown must exactly match the Google account that owns or has full access to your GSC property. 3. If the accounts do not match, click Disconnect, then Connect GSC and sign in with the correct Google account. 4. After authorising, use the Property dropdown to select the exact GSC property that corresponds to your website. Note that https://www.example.com and https://example.com are treated as separate properties in GSC — select the one that has verified data. 5. Click Confirm Connection. A green status indicator confirms the link is active. Note: If you manage multiple sites, repeat this process inside each OTTO project individually. GSC connections are not shared across projects. 🔥 4. Wildfire Community Backlinks Being Auto-Deployed Without Approval By default, Wildfire can be set to auto-deploy approved link opportunities. If links are going live without your explicit review, the auto-deployment control needs to be adjusted. 1. Navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) and open your OTTO project. 2. Select the Wildfire tab, then open Deployment Settings. 3. Locate the Auto-Deploy Mode toggle. If it is set to On, all opportunities that meet your minimum score threshold will deploy automatically. 4. Switch Auto-Deploy Mode to Off to require manual approval for every link before it goes live. 5. Alternatively, keep auto-deploy enabled but raise the Minimum Quality Score threshold to a higher value (for example, 70 or above) so only high-confidence opportunities are deployed without review. 6. To review links already deployed without approval, go to the Deployed Links log and use the Retract option next to any link you want removed. 7. Click Save Deployment Settings to apply your changes. Best practice: Set auto-deploy to Off when you first set up Wildfire and only enable it after you have reviewed several batches and are confident in the quality scoring for your niche. 📊 5. PPC Keyword Operations Stuck in Pending Status PPC keyword tasks remain in pending status when the Google Ads account is not properly connected or when the account permissions are insufficient. 1. Go to Settings → Integrations in the left sidebar. 2. Under Google Ads, check the connection status. If it shows Not Connected or Expired, click Connect Google Ads and complete the OAuth flow using the Google account that has Standard or Admin access to your Ads account. 3. After connecting, select the correct Ads Account ID from the dropdown. If you manage multiple accounts, ensure you select the account that contains the campaigns you want OTTO to optimise. 4. Return to the PPC Keywords panel and check whether any pending operations now show a Processing or Completed status. Allow up to 10 minutes for the queue to clear after reconnecting. 5. If operations remain stuck after reconnecting, click the three-dot menu next to a pending task and select Retry. If the retry fails with an error code, note the code and contact support. Note: Read-only Google Ads access will cause all write operations — such as adding keywords or adjusting bids — to fail. The connected account must have Standard access or higher. 💬 Still Need Help? 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.

📤 Find Your OTTO Work Summary in Google Drive

🔍 Overview When you export a work summary from OTTO, Search Atlas sends the file directly to your connected Google Drive account. If the file does not appear, the most common causes are an incomplete Google account connection, insufficient Drive permissions, or the file landing in an unexpected folder. Follow the steps below to locate your export and fix any underlying issues. ✅ Step 1: Confirm Your Google Account Is Connected OTTO requires an authenticated Google account before it can export files to Google Drive. If your account is not linked, the export may appear to succeed inside Search Atlas but the file will never reach Drive. 1. In Search Atlas, navigate to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar, then open SEO Automation (URL: /seo-automation-v3). 2. Click your Avatar in the top-right corner and select Settings. 3. Open the Integrations tab (Settings tabs: Profile, Email Settings, Team Members, Integrations, CMS Connectors, API Keys). 4. Confirm that a Google account is listed and shows a Connected status. 5. If no account is connected, go to Site Metrics → Site Explorer (GSC page) and click Connect GSC Account or Connect GA Account to complete the OAuth sign-in flow. Once connected, re-export your work summary and check Google Drive again. 🔑 Step 2: Check Google Drive Permissions Even when an account is connected, restricted Drive permissions can block file creation. Google may prompt you to grant additional access. 1. Go to myaccount.google.com/permissions and sign in with the account linked to Search Atlas. 2. Find Search Atlas in the list of third-party apps. 3. Confirm that See, edit, create, and delete files in Google Drive is listed as a granted permission. 4. If this permission is missing or restricted, remove Search Atlas from the list and reconnect your Google account inside Search Atlas to trigger a fresh permission request. 📁 Step 3: Search Google Drive for the File Exported summaries may land in a location other than My Drive. Before assuming the export failed, do a targeted search inside Drive. 1. Open Google Drive and click the search bar at the top. 2. Type OTTO or work summary and press Enter. 3. Change the search scope to Everywhere to include shared drives and folders. 4. Check the Shared with me section in the left sidebar — files sent by a connected app sometimes appear here instead of My Drive. 5. Check the Recent view to see the latest files added to your Drive regardless of folder location. 🔄 Step 4: Re-export the Work Summary If you cannot find the file after searching, trigger a fresh export. 1. Navigate to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar, open SEO Automation, and open your OTTO project. 2. Locate the work summary you need and click the Export to Docs button in OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview). 3. Wait for the confirmation message that the export completed successfully. 4. Switch to Google Drive immediately and check Recent for the new file. If you receive an error message during export, take note of the exact wording — this will help the support team diagnose the issue faster. ⚠️ Step 5: Resolve Common Error Scenarios - Session expired / re-authentication required: Disconnect your Google account from Search Atlas and reconnect it. Authentication tokens expire and must be refreshed periodically. - Wrong Google account connected: If you have multiple Google accounts, confirm that the account connected in Search Atlas is the same account you are checking in Google Drive. - Storage quota exceeded: Google Drive has a 15 GB free storage limit. If your Drive is full, new files cannot be created. Free up space or upgrade your Google One storage plan, then retry the export. - Organisational Google Workspace restrictions: Some Workspace admins block third-party app access to Drive. Contact your Google Workspace administrator to confirm that Search Atlas is allowed. 💬 Still Can't Find Your Export? If you have worked through every step above and your work summary still does not appear in Google Drive, our team can investigate the export log for your account directly. 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. To speed up the investigation, please have the following ready: the name of the OTTO project, the approximate date and time of the export attempt, and the Google account email address connected to Search Atlas.

🛠️ Fix OTTO SEO Analysis Scheduling Delays

🔍 Overview If OTTO SEO Automation shows a next analysis date that has already passed — for example, the scheduled date reads Aug 27 but today is Aug 30 — and no new analysis has run, this article explains why it happens and what steps to take to resolve it. ⚙️ Why Scheduling Delays Happen OTTO SEO Automation schedules analyses based on a queue that processes sites in order. Delays can occur for several reasons: - High queue volume: During peak usage periods, the analysis queue may back up, pushing scheduled runs past their original date. - Site processing time: Larger websites with many pages take longer to crawl and analyse, which can cause the next scheduled run to slip. - Temporary system lag: Occasionally, a background sync issue can cause the displayed next analysis date to fall out of step with the actual queue position. - Account or project configuration changes: Recent changes to your project settings, domain, or connected site can pause or reset the analysis schedule. ✅ How to Check the Current Status 1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then open SEO Automation to open the OTTO SEO Automation dashboard (URL: /seo-automation-v3). 2. Locate the affected project and review the Next Analysis date displayed on the project card. 3. Compare that date with today's date to confirm the delay is real and not a display refresh issue. 4. Try a hard browser refresh (Ctrl + Shift + R on Windows or Cmd + Shift + R on Mac) to rule out a cached date being shown. 🚀 Steps to Resolve the Delay 1. Refresh the page after a few minutes. Queue processing is automatic, and the analysis may complete shortly after you notice the delay. 2. Manually trigger a new analysis if the option is available on your plan. Open the project inside OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) and look for a Scan or Run diagnostics button to force the process to start immediately. 3. Verify your project is active. Confirm the project status shows as active and is not paused. A paused project will not run scheduled analyses. 4. Check for recent changes. If you recently updated the target URL, changed the domain, or modified project settings, the schedule may have reset. Review your project configuration and confirm all required fields are saved correctly. 5. Wait up to 24 hours. In cases of high queue volume, analyses that are a few days overdue will typically complete within 24 hours as the queue clears. 💡 Tips to Prevent Future Delays - Avoid making frequent changes to project settings, as each change can interrupt or reset the analysis queue for that project. - Monitor your scheduled analysis dates regularly inside the OTTO SEO V3 dashboard so you can spot and address delays early. - If you manage multiple projects, note that all projects share the same processing queue — large or complex sites may occasionally push smaller ones back. 🆘 Still Seeing a Delay? If you have followed the steps above and the analysis still has not run after 24 hours, our team can investigate the queue status for your specific project. 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.

🔧 Fix OTTO SSL Errors and Subdomain Traffic Serving Issues

Overview OTTO relies on a correctly installed pixel to serve optimizations across your connected domains. SSL certificate errors can prevent the pixel from loading securely, which blocks OTTO from serving traffic on affected domains. This article walks you through diagnosing and resolving SSL-related pixel issues on your site. Why This Happens SSL errors occur when the OTTO pixel script is blocked by your server or CDN because it cannot establish a trusted secure connection. Common causes include: - The pixel script src uses http:// instead of https://, causing a mixed-content error on HTTPS sites - An expired or missing SSL certificate on the domain or subdomain where OTTO is deployed - CDN or firewall rules that strip, rewrite, or block third-party scripts - A Content Security Policy (CSP) header that does not allow the OTTO pixel domain Steps to Diagnose and Fix the Issue 1. Check the pixel URL protocol: Confirm that the OTTO pixel snippet's src attribute begins with https://. An http:// reference on an HTTPS page will trigger a mixed-content error and silently prevent the pixel from loading. 2. Confirm your SSL certificate is valid: Use a tool such as SSL Labs or your browser's padlock icon to verify your domain's certificate is active, not expired, and covers all subdomains where OTTO should serve. A wildcard certificate (*.yourdomain.com) is recommended when OTTO is deployed across multiple subdomains. 3. Review subdomain DNS and CDN settings: Each subdomain must resolve correctly. Check for CDN rules or firewall policies that may strip or rewrite the OTTO pixel script. Common culprits include Cloudflare Rocket Loader, HTML minification rules that break inline scripts, and WAF rules blocking third-party script tags. 4. Update your Content Security Policy (CSP): If your site uses a CSP header, ensure the OTTO pixel domain is included in your script-src and connect-src directives. If you are unsure which domain to whitelist, contact our support team using the instructions at the bottom of this article. 5. Confirm the pixel is present on all affected pages: Verify the OTTO pixel snippet is included in the <head> section of every page you want OTTO to serve, including pages on subdomains. 6. Test after each change: After making any of the changes above, load the affected page in your browser and open the developer console (F12) to confirm no SSL or mixed-content errors are reported for the OTTO pixel script. What to Have Ready When Contacting Support If you have worked through the steps above and the pixel is still not loading, our team can investigate further. Please have the following ready when you reach out. 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.

🤖 Search Atlas — OTTO SEO Automation Issues

This article covers OTTO crawl behavior, schema deployment, technical SEO automation, indexing requests, Knowledge Graph generation, and Local SEO reporting. ⚠️ Error 1: OTTO crawl shows "in progress" for hours without completing What's happening: Large sites or sites with redirect chains can cause crawl timeouts. Steps to try: - Go to Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) → Recrawl Site button - If the recrawl button is greyed out, wait 30 minutes, refresh the page and try again - For very large sites (10,000+ pages), crawls may take up to 4 hours ⚠️ Error 2: OTTO schema deployments are not appearing on the live site What's happening: Schema is deployed via our content delivery layer. DNS propagation or caching on your site can delay visibility. Steps to try: - Use Google's Rich Results Test to check if schema is present - If not visible after 24 hours, go to Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) → Select Your Site → OTTO Grader (Onpage Optimizations) → Schema Markup → Regenerate → Enable - Confirm your CMS connection is active - WordPress users: confirm the Search Atlas WordPress plugin is installed and connected ⚠️ Error 3: Technical SEO fixes show as "applied" but are not live What's happening: Fixes applied through OTTO require your CMS connection to be active. If the connection token expired, fixes queue but do not push. Steps to try: - Go to Top-right Corner Avatar → Settings → CMS Connectors - Reconnect your CMS integration - Clean cache - Re-apply the pending fixes ⚠️ Error 4: Site Audit not detecting new pages added after the last crawl What's happening: OTTO crawls are scheduled — new pages are picked up on the next scheduled crawl, not immediately. Steps to try: - Trigger a manual recrawl from Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) → Recrawl Site button ⚠️ Error 5: OTTO on-page optimization pages not appearing after recrawl (only partial pages/fixes showing) What's happening: After a recrawl, OTTO may detect all new pages in Site Audit, but the On-Page Optimizations section may only show fixes for a subset of pages (for example, 1 fix visible despite 17 pages detected). This is typically caused by a project processing issue on the backend that requires a manual reprocess. Steps to try: 1. First, trigger a recrawl: Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) → Recrawl Site button 2. Wait for the crawl to complete, then check Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → Overview (OTTO Grader, Onpage Optimizations) to see whether the full page count is now reflected 3. If the page/fix count still does not match the number of detected pages, contact Support and request a manual project reprocess — this must be initiated by Higher Tier Support 4. Once the manual reprocess completes, refresh the OTTO dashboard and verify all pages now appear under On-Page Optimizations ⚠️ Error 6: Indexing requests not being submitted to Google What's happening: Google Search Console must be connected and authorized for indexing requests to go through. Steps to try: - Go to Left Sidebar → Site Metrics → Site Explorer (GSC accounts screen) - If your account is not connected → Click Connect GSC Account ⚠️ Error 7: Knowledge graph is not populating What's happening: The knowledge graph requires your Brand Vault to have basic company information filled in. Steps to try: - Go to More Features (top-right) → Brand Vault - Ensure your business name, description, and website URL are correct and saved ⚠️ Error 8: OTTO shows "No data" for a project that was previously working What's happening: Projects with expired domain connections stop receiving data. Steps to try: - Go to Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites and verify the domain is still listed - If the project is missing, re-add it via Left Sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites → + Create ⚠️ Error 9: Local SEO presentation reports (Section content to be completed.)

⚡ OTTO Tool: Fix Deleted Articles Still Appearing

Why Does OTTO Still Recognize Deleted Articles? If you have deleted an article and OTTO continues to reference or recognize it, this is a known issue that our team can investigate and resolve on your behalf. Because the exact behavior depends on how your site's content is indexed within OTTO, the resolution requires a support agent to review your specific workspace. What to Prepare Before Contacting Support To help our team resolve this as quickly as possible, please have the following ready when you reach out: - Your project or workspace name in Search Atlas where the issue is occurring. - The URL or title of the deleted article that OTTO is still referencing. - Confirmation that the article has been fully removed from your live website (e.g., the URL now returns a 404 error or redirect) and from your CMS (not saved as a draft or in the trash). - A description of where OTTO is still showing the deleted article — for example, in suggestions, content recommendations, or another specific area of the platform. - The approximate date and time when you first noticed the issue. Having this information ready will allow our support team to investigate your content index and take the appropriate action to clear the outdated reference from your workspace. What Happens Next Once you contact support, a team member will review your OTTO workspace and work to remove the deleted article from your content index. You do not need to take any additional steps in the platform before speaking with our team. 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO 'No Service ID Returned' Connection Error

🔍 What Is This Error? When you add a global project in OTTO SEO and attempt to connect it to a website, you may see the error: "No service ID was returned." This means OTTO was unable to complete the connection because a required service identifier was not generated during the setup process. This is typically a configuration or timing issue — not a problem with your website. ⚙️ Common Causes - The project was created before the domain was fully verified or indexed in Search Atlas. - A required integration step was skipped during the global project setup. - The project was added too quickly after domain entry, before the system finished registering the service. - A temporary platform sync issue interrupted the service ID generation. 🚀 Step-by-Step Resolution 1. Navigate to SEO Automation. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then open SEO Automation. The URL will be /seo-automation-v3. 2. Locate your project. Find the global project you added for the affected site (for example, your Select Insurance project) in the OTTO project list. 3. Disconnect the project. Click the options menu next to the project and select Disconnect or Remove Connection. Confirm when prompted. 4. Delete the project entirely. If the disconnect option alone does not resolve the issue, delete the project from your OTTO workspace so you can start fresh. 5. Wait 2–3 minutes. Allow the platform time to clear the previous session data and service registration before recreating the project. 6. Re-add the global project. Click Create Project (on the Home page), enter your domain details carefully, and complete every field before submitting. Do not navigate away during this step. 7. Attempt the connection again. Once the project appears in your list, click Connect to OTTO and wait for the confirmation message. The service ID should now be returned successfully. 💡 Tips to Prevent This Error - Always verify that your domain is active and accessible before adding it as a global project. - Complete all setup fields in a single session — do not leave the form partially filled and return later. - If you manage multiple projects, add them one at a time and confirm each connection before moving to the next. - Refresh the OTTO dashboard before starting a new project connection to ensure you are working with the latest session data. 📊 Still Seeing the Error After Reconnecting? In rare cases, the service ID generation may fail due to a backend sync issue that requires manual intervention. If you have followed all the steps above and the error persists, it is best to reach out so a teammate can investigate your specific project configuration. 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.

🛠️ Fix Website Studio Blueprint Not Rendering Correctly

🔍 Overview If your Website Studio staged preview is displaying a generic baseline template instead of your approved blueprint, the most common cause is a Brand Vault disconnection or an HTTP 403 WebSocket sync error. This article walks you through what causes the issue and the steps to resolve it without needing to rebuild your project from scratch. ⚠️ What Causes This Issue When Website Studio generates or previews a blueprint, it establishes a real-time WebSocket connection to Brand Vault to pull in your approved assets — fonts, colours, logos, and page structure. If that connection is interrupted or returns an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) error, the platform cannot authenticate the sync and falls back to a default baseline template as a safety measure. Common triggers include: - Your Brand Vault session token expired mid-build - A permissions change on the Brand Vault project while the build was in progress - A temporary platform connectivity issue that broke the WebSocket handshake - Navigating away from the editor before the blueprint finished saving ✅ How to Force a Blueprint Rebuild Follow these steps in order. Most customers resolve the issue at Step 3 or 4. 1. Confirm your blueprint is saved. Open Website Studio and navigate to your project. Go to Blueprints and verify your approved 6-page (or multi-page) blueprint appears in the list with a Saved status badge. If the status shows Draft, save it manually before continuing. 2. Reconnect Brand Vault. Open the Brand Vault panel via the header apps-grid icon → More Features → Brand Vault. If you see a Disconnected or Sync Error warning, click Reconnect. Wait for the green Connected indicator before proceeding. 3. Clear the staging preview cache. In the top toolbar, click the Preview dropdown and select Clear Preview Cache. Confirm when prompted. This forces the staging environment to discard the cached baseline template. 4. Trigger a manual rebuild. Click Preview again and select Rebuild from Blueprint. Website Studio will re-fetch your approved blueprint and all associated Brand Vault assets. This process typically takes 30–90 seconds depending on the number of pages. 5. Verify the staged preview. Once the rebuild completes, open the staged preview link. You should see your approved blueprint with all branding, layout, and page structure applied correctly. 🔄 If the 403 WebSocket Error Persists A persistent HTTP 403 error usually points to a permissions or session issue rather than a connectivity problem. Try the following: - Log out and log back in to refresh your authentication token, then repeat the rebuild steps above. - Check Brand Vault permissions. If you are part of a team, confirm with your account admin that your user role has Admin access to the Brand Vault project linked to this Website Studio build. - Try a different browser or incognito window. Browser extensions or cached credentials can occasionally interfere with the WebSocket handshake. - Wait 5 minutes and retry. If the platform experienced a brief service disruption, the WebSocket connection should automatically re-establish once connectivity is restored. 💡 Tips to Prevent This Issue in the Future - Always save your blueprint explicitly before starting a preview build — do not rely on auto-save alone. - Keep the Website Studio editor tab active during a build. Switching tabs or minimising the browser can interrupt the WebSocket connection. - Reconnect Brand Vault before triggering any preview or publish action, especially after periods of inactivity. - If you have multiple Brand Vault projects, double-check that the correct Brand Vault is selected for this Website Studio project before rebuilding. 📞 Still Need Help? If you have followed all the steps above and your blueprint is still rendering as a baseline template, our team can inspect the sync logs and WebSocket error details on your account directly. 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.

🛡️ Disconnect OTTO Projects Without Losing Rankings

🧭 Overview When you no longer need an active OTTO SEO project, it is natural to want to remove it from your workspace. However, simply deleting a project can strip away optimizations that are actively supporting your rankings. This article explains why deletion can be risky and walks you through the recommended safe disconnection process for an OTTO project. ⚠️ Why Deletion Can Damage Your Rankings Deleting an OTTO project does more than tidy up your dashboard — it can reverse the SEO work OTTO has deployed on your site. Here is what you risk when you delete rather than pause or freeze a project: - Reversal of applied optimizations: On-page changes, schema markup, and other deployments may be rolled back. - Loss of project data: All historical data, audit results, and configurations are permanently removed and cannot be recovered. - Ranking drops: Pages that were benefiting from OTTO's active optimizations may lose their positions in search results. To avoid these outcomes, the recommended approach is to pause or freeze the project rather than deleting it. ❄️ What Does Pausing or Freezing a Project Do? Pausing or freezing an OTTO project stops active automation without removing any of the optimizations already applied to your site. This means: - Your existing rankings and deployed changes are preserved. - All project data, history, and settings remain intact. - No new changes are pushed to your site. - You can reactivate the project at any time without losing progress. This is the safest way to disconnect from OTTO when you are unsure about the future of a project or want to stop activity without risking ranking loss. 🔢 How to Safely Disconnect an OTTO Project 1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) to open the main OTTO SEO dashboard. 2. Locate the project you want to disconnect from the list of active projects. 3. Look for the option to pause or freeze the project within that project's settings or management controls. 4. Select the pause or freeze option and confirm the action when prompted. The project will move to an inactive state, pausing all active automation. 5. Verify that the project now appears in the Deep Frozen tab of the All Sites (SEO Automation) page. Your site's optimizations remain live and your rankings are protected. The project is now safely disconnected from active automation. 🔄 How to Reactivate a Paused Project If you decide to resume OTTO automation in the future, reactivating a paused project is straightforward: 1. Go to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) in the left sidebar. 2. Find your paused project in the Deep Frozen tab of the All Sites (SEO Automation) page. 3. Select the option to reactivate or unfreeze the project and confirm when prompted. 4. OTTO will resume automation from where it left off, with all previous data and settings intact. If you are unsure which option to choose, or if you do not see a pause or freeze option for your project, reach out to our support team before deleting — a team member can confirm the safest path forward for your specific setup. 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.

🔍 OTTO SEO Project Showing No Issues Found

🧭 Overview After creating a new OTTO SEO project, you may notice that all on-page optimization categories display "No issues found" with zero recommendations. This is a known processing issue that can affect newly created projects and does not mean your site is fully optimized. This article explains why it happens and what to have ready when contacting support. ⚠️ Why This Happens There are a few possible reasons your OTTO SEO project may return no issues or recommendations: - Analysis did not complete correctly: In some cases, OTTO begins processing a project but fails to return analysis results, even when your site has been detected in Site Audit and is correctly whitelisted. - Project is still initializing: Newly created projects sometimes need additional time to fully process before recommendations appear. - Data did not load in the background: OTTO may display a success message for certain categories while no actual project data is loaded in the background. 🛠️ Steps to Try Before Escalating 1. Wait and refresh: If your project was created recently, give it some additional time to process and then refresh the page to check if recommendations have populated. 2. Verify your Site Audit is active: OTTO relies on Site Audit data to generate recommendations. Confirm that a Site Audit has been run for the same domain and that crawl results are available. 3. Check that your domain is whitelisted: Inside OTTO SEO → Site Audit → All Audits (Site Audit) via the 'How to Whitelist our Crawler?' link, confirm the correct domain is connected and whitelisted. A misconfigured domain can prevent analysis from running. 4. Clear your browser cache: Occasionally, a cached page state can display outdated results. Clear your cache and reload the OTTO SEO dashboard. ✅ What a Healthy OTTO Project Looks Like Once OTTO has successfully analyzed your site, you should see: - A non-zero page count listed in your project overview - Categorized on-page recommendations such as title tag issues, meta descriptions, heading structure, and more - An accurate count of issues per category with actionable suggestions 📋 What to Have Ready When Escalating If your project still shows zero pages and no recommendations across every category after following the steps above, the issue will need to be investigated by our backend team. Please have the following ready: - The exact name of the affected OTTO SEO project - The domain associated with the project - Any error messages or status messages displayed in the project dashboard - The approximate date and time the project was created or last processed 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.

⚠️ OTTO Corrupts Inline JavaScript — Slider Revolution and Modern JS Syntax

OTTO can inadvertently corrupt inline JavaScript that uses modern operators — specifically ?? (nullish coalescing) and ??= (nullish assignment) — causing plugins like Slider Revolution to fail silently. Disabling OTTO and clearing your site cache immediately restores affected elements while the engineering fix is deployed. 🔍 What Is Happening OTTO's page-optimization feature processes inline script blocks on your site. In some cases, it collapses the ?? and ??= operators — valid modern JavaScript syntax — down to a single ?, producing a JavaScript SyntaxError. Because browsers suppress SyntaxErrors in inline scripts silently, the affected script stops executing entirely, which causes: - Plugin sliders (e.g., Slider Revolution) to appear blank or disappear entirely - Any plugin or widget sharing the same inline script block to stop working - No visible error message on the front end of your site Who is affected: Sites running OTTO alongside Slider Revolution, or any theme or plugin that uses ?? or ??= operators in inline JavaScript. 🛠️ Workaround Steps Follow these steps to restore your slider and other affected JavaScript elements immediately. 1. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard. 2. Go to Search Atlas → Settings in the left-hand navigation menu. 3. Disable OTTO for your site, or toggle off the page-optimization feature. 4. Clear any server-side or CDN cache for your site. 5. Reload your homepage — Slider Revolution and all affected JavaScript elements should now render correctly. Note: OTTO's SEO-assistance features are paused while it is disabled. You can re-enable OTTO safely once the fix is released. 📡 Engineering Status Our engineering team has identified and resolved the root cause of this issue. The fix is complete and is awaiting release. No action beyond the workaround above is required — once the update is deployed to your site, you can re-enable OTTO without any risk to your inline JavaScript. 📞 When to Contact Support Reach out to the Search Atlas support team if: - The workaround steps above do not restore your slider or affected elements - You cannot access the OTTO settings panel in your WordPress dashboard - You notice additional JavaScript failures after disabling OTTO When you contact us, include your site URL and a brief description of which elements are still affected after following the workaround. 🌀 Our engineering team has already resolved the root cause and the fix is on its way — once deployed, re-enabling OTTO will restore full optimization with no impact on your JavaScript. If your slider is still missing after following the steps above, contact our support team for direct assistance.

🔍 Fix OTTO Page Count Discrepancies in Issues

🧭 Overview When you open OTTO, you may notice that the total page count at the top looks correct — for example, 16 pages detected — but individual issue sections like Title Tags or Meta Descriptions show only a small subset, such as 3 pages. This discrepancy is a known issue that the support team can investigate and resolve on a per-account basis. ⚙️ Why This Happens OTTO pulls its page-level data directly from your Site Audit crawl. In some cases, OTTO may detect the total number of pages on your site but not yet reflect the full page count across individual issue sections. This can result in a temporary gap between the overall page count and what appears in specific issue areas. ✅ What To Do If you are seeing fewer pages in OTTO's issue sections than your total detected page count, here is what you can do: - Note your project name and the specific issue sections where pages appear to be missing. - Note the total page count displayed versus the number shown in the affected sections. - Check whether your Site Audit has fully completed before escalating — if a crawl is still in progress, allow it to finish and then check the issue sections again. - If the numbers still do not match after the audit has completed, contact the support team with the details above so they can investigate your account directly. 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.

🔧 Fix a Zero OTTO Score and Enable Automations

🧭 Overview If your OTTO Score shows 0 and no fixes are being applied — even though the OTTO pixel appears installed — there are a few common causes related to automation settings and pixel placement. This guide explains what to check so you can get OTTO actively optimising your site. 🔗 Step 1: Enable Internal Linking and Alt Text Automations Internal linking and alt text automations are not enabled by default. You must turn them on manually inside your OTTO project settings. Once enabled, OTTO will begin generating internal link suggestions and writing alt text for images on your connected site. Allow a few minutes for the first pass to complete. ✅ Step 2: Verify the OTTO Pixel Is Placed Correctly The dashboard may show the pixel as installed even if it is placed in the wrong location. An incorrectly placed pixel prevents OTTO from reading your site and deploying fixes. If you are unsure whether your pixel is placed correctly, check your site's page source or plugin configuration and confirm the OTTO snippet is present and active on your live pages. 🔌 Step 3: Confirm Your Project Is Connected A disconnected project will show the pixel as installed but will not process any fixes or update your OTTO Score. Inside your project settings, verify that the site URL and connection status are correct. If the project appears disconnected, reinstall the pixel snippet on your site and re-verify the connection from within your project settings. 📋 When to Contact Support If you have completed the steps above and your OTTO Score remains at 0, a member of our team can investigate further on the backend. Please have the following ready when you reach out: - Your project name and the domain URL as entered in your project settings - The current connection status shown in your project settings - A description of which automations you have attempted to enable - Any error messages you have seen 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.

🔄 Fix Header Changes Not Appearing After Deletion

🧩 Why This Happens When you delete a header optimization in Search Atlas — such as an OTTO-managed header tag — the change is saved on the platform side. However, your website or browser may still be serving a cached version of the page, which means the old header value continues to appear on the frontend even though it has been removed from your settings. This is a standard caching behavior and is not a bug in Search Atlas. Clearing the relevant caches will resolve the issue in most cases. 🗺️ Where to Find Header Optimizations Header optimizations managed by OTTO or applied manually can be found within Search Atlas. Before clearing any cache, confirm the deletion was saved successfully by revisiting the relevant section of the platform and verifying the header optimization no longer appears in your settings. ✅ Step 1 — Confirm the Deletion in Search Atlas 1. Navigate to the section of Search Atlas where you made the change. 2. Locate the page or section where the header optimization was applied. 3. Confirm the OTTO tag or custom header value is no longer listed. 4. If the optimization is still present, delete it again and save your changes before proceeding. 🌐 Step 2 — Clear Your Browser Cache Your browser stores copies of web pages to load them faster. This cached version may still display the old header value after deletion. 1. Open your browser settings (usually accessible via the menu in the top-right corner). 2. Navigate to Privacy and Security or Clear Browsing Data. 3. Select Cached images and files (and optionally cookies if the issue persists). 4. Set the time range to All time to ensure no old data remains. 5. Click Clear data and then reload your website in a new tab. Quick shortcut: On most browsers, pressing Ctrl + Shift + Delete (Windows) or Cmd + Shift + Delete (Mac) opens the clear cache dialog directly. 🖥️ Step 3 — Clear Your Website Server Cache If clearing the browser cache does not resolve the issue, your web server or hosting provider may be caching the page at the server level. The steps for this vary depending on your setup: - WordPress with a caching plugin (e.g., WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache): Log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to the plugin settings, and select Clear All Cache or Purge Cache. - Cloudflare or other CDN: Log in to your Cloudflare dashboard, navigate to the Caching section, and select Purge Everything or purge the specific URL where the header change was made. - Other hosting providers: Refer to your hosting provider's documentation for instructions on purging or clearing the server-side page cache. 🔁 Step 4 — Verify the Fix 1. After clearing all relevant caches, open your website in a new browser tab or an incognito/private window. 2. Inspect the page header using your browser's developer tools (right-click → Inspect → Elements) to confirm the old header value is no longer present. 3. If the old header value still appears, repeat the cache-clearing steps for any additional caching layers (e.g., a secondary CDN or server-side object cache). 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.

🔧 Running Multiple SEO Tools Alongside OTTO Without Conflicts

Overview If you use Search Atlas OTTO alongside another SEO plugin such as Rank Math, both tools can write metadata, schema, and canonical tags to the same pages. When two tools output the same fields simultaneously, search engines may see conflicting or duplicate signals — which can hurt rather than help your rankings. This article explains how to safely roll back OTTO changes, configure Rank Math and OTTO so they do not conflict, validate that no duplicate tags are live, and understand how Search Atlas delivers value for local service businesses. How to Roll Back OTTO SEO Changes OTTO logs every change it makes, so you can reverse deployments without manually editing your CMS. To roll back OTTO changes, navigate to the OTTO session for the site you want to revert within your Search Atlas account and look for options to undo or revert previously deployed changes. If you are unable to locate the rollback option within your session, or the specific controls do not appear as expected, please reach out to the support team — a teammate can perform or confirm the rollback on your behalf and walk you through the exact steps for your account's current interface. After reverting any changes, clear your site cache and any CDN cache layer so that search engines and browsers fetch the restored version immediately. Why Duplicate Metadata Is a Problem Duplicate metadata occurs when two tools both inject values into the same HTML fields — for example, two <title> tags, two meta description tags, or two sets of schema markup for the same entity. The specific risks include: - Unpredictable rendering: Browsers and crawlers use the first tag they encounter, so the version you carefully optimised may be ignored entirely. - Schema validation errors: Duplicate or conflicting JSON-LD blocks cause Google's Rich Results Test to flag errors, removing your eligibility for rich snippets. - Wasted crawl budget: Conflicting canonical tags can signal contradictory preferred URLs, confusing crawlers about which version of a page to index. - Ranking instability: Search engines may distrust inconsistent signals and deprioritise affected pages in their index. Configuring Rank Math and OTTO to Coexist The safest approach is a clear division of responsibility: one tool owns on-page metadata and the other owns a separate, non-overlapping scope. The key principle is to ensure that only one tool is actively writing to any given metadata field at a time — for example, title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and schema markup. Review the settings in both OTTO and Rank Math to identify any overlapping output areas and disable the relevant features in whichever tool you designate as secondary for that field type. If you are unsure which settings to adjust or how to confirm that conflicts have been resolved, our support team can review your specific setup and provide tailored guidance. 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.

🚩 OTTO False Positives: Why Fixed Issues Still Appear as Flags

🔄 Why OTTO still shows issues you've already fixed OTTO analyzes your site on a weekly crawl cycle. The flags and recommendations you see are based on the data from the most recent crawl. If you fixed an issue today, it will not disappear from OTTO until the next weekly analysis runs. ⚠️ Common false positive scenarios - "Multiple Meta Descriptions" flagged on pages you've already corrected - "Too Many External Links" on pages you've edited - Missing H1 or title tag errors on pages that now have them - Schema markup warnings on pages where you've deployed correct schema - Missing alt tag or "image not in NextGen/modern format" warnings on images that are actually correct — this can happen when the crawler reaches an authenticated, cached, or origin-layer version of the page instead of the public view (see Known issues below) - Redirect-related false positives, such as a page flagged as redirecting only because of trailing-slash differences (for example example.com/ vs example.com) In all these cases, the flag reflects stale crawl data, not your current site state. ✅ What to do 1. Wait for the next weekly analysis — if you've fixed the issue, it will automatically disappear after OTTO's next crawl 2. Trigger a manual recrawl — if your plan supports it, you can request a fresh crawl from OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) using the 'Recrawl Site' button 3. Don't re-fix what you've already fixed — making additional changes based on stale flags can create new problems 🔍 How to verify your fix is live before the next crawl Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool to fetch and render your page as Google sees it. You can also open the affected page in an incognito/unauthenticated browser window. OTTO audits the public, anonymous version of your page, so the incognito view is the closest match to what the crawler should see. If the page looks correct in incognito but OTTO still flags it, the flag is most likely a false positive rather than a real issue. 🛠️ Known issues we're tracking - Alt tag and modern-image-format false positives: We have identified a bug where the audit can incorrectly flag images as missing alt tags or as not being in NextGen/modern format (such as WebP/AVIF) even when they are correctly implemented on the public page. This occurs when the crawler accesses a non-public variant of the page; the incognito view shows the correct state. A fix is currently awaiting release. - Redirect false positives: Several redirect-handling false positives — including pages flagged as redirecting due to trailing-slash normalization and lowercase-URL checks incorrectly flagging the domain or scheme — have been fixed and released.

⏸️ How to Stop OTTO From Changing Your Site

🔍 Overview OTTO SEO can automatically apply on-page optimisations to your website. If you want to stop OTTO from making further changes — without losing the work already done — this article explains what to have ready when you contact our team for hands-on help. 📋 What to Have Ready Before Contacting Support Stopping OTTO from making further changes to your site requires assistance from our support team, who can identify the correct setting or action for your specific project configuration. To help them resolve this as quickly as possible, please have the following ready when you reach out: - Your OTTO SEO project name or the domain it is connected to - A description of the changes OTTO is making that you want to stop - Any steps you have already tried - The date and time you first noticed the unwanted changes 💡 What Happens to Existing Work? Pausing or disabling OTTO activity does not remove optimisations that have already been applied or saved. Your existing project data and optimisations are preserved regardless of how OTTO activity is stopped. 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.

🔄 Fix OTTO SEO Analysis Stale Scheduled Dates

🧭 Overview If OTTO SEO shows a next analysis date that has already passed — for example, displaying Aug 27 when today is Aug 30 — this may indicate that the scheduled analysis task did not run as expected. This article explains what information to gather and how to get support to resolve it. 🔍 What This Issue Looks Like You may be experiencing an analysis scheduling delay if: - The next scheduled analysis date shown in your OTTO SEO dashboard is in the past and has not updated. - No new analysis results have appeared despite the scheduled date having passed. - The analysis does not appear to be running or queued. This is distinct from a normal scheduling cycle where the next analysis date is today or in the future and OTTO is simply waiting for its next run. 🚨 What To Do Because OTTO SEO analysis scheduling is managed at the backend level, resolving a stale or missed scheduled date requires investigation by the support team. There is no self-serve button or setting within the platform that is confirmed to reset the scheduler. To help the support team resolve this as quickly as possible, please have the following ready before reaching out: - Your project or site name as it appears in the OTTO SEO dashboard. - The stale next analysis date currently displayed (e.g., "Aug 27"). - Today's date and how many days the date has been in the past. - Any error messages or warning banners visible on your OTTO dashboard — copy the exact wording if possible. - The last date a successful analysis did complete, if visible in your dashboard. 📋 What to Expect Once the support team investigates, they will be able to identify whether the scheduled task failed to trigger and take the necessary backend action to reset it. You do not need to attempt workarounds in the meantime, as doing so may not address the underlying scheduling issue. 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.

OTTO Suggested Fix Edits Not Saving

🔍 What This Article Covers Some users found that when they manually edited an OTTO suggested fix — for example, changing an auto-generated title to their preferred wording — the change would not persist after attempting to save it. The field reverted to the original OTTO suggestion every time. This article explains what caused the issue and what to do if you experience it. ⚙️ What Was Causing the Problem This was a confirmed platform bug. When a user manually edited an OTTO suggested fix and attempted to save it, the save did not persist and the field reverted to the original suggestion. This issue affected manual edits to OTTO on-page suggestions such as titles and meta descriptions. ✅ Steps to Try If You Experience This Issue If you are seeing edits fail to save, work through the following steps in order: 1. Refresh the page and try again. Close the current tab, navigate back to the OTTO suggestions area, and attempt the edit again. 2. Clear your browser cache or try an incognito/private window. Cached data can sometimes cause the interface to behave unexpectedly. Test in a private browsing session to rule this out. 3. Try a different browser. If the issue appears in one browser but not another, a local browser extension or setting may be interfering. 💡 Still Seeing the Problem? If you have followed all the steps above and your manually edited OTTO suggestions are still not saving, this may indicate a separate or environment-specific issue that needs investigation. Please reach out to our support team and we will investigate further. 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.

🛠️ Troubleshoot OTTO SEO Setup and Errors

🔍 Overview OTTO is Search Atlas's AI-powered SEO automation tool. When customers first activate OTTO or deploy its recommendations, they sometimes notice unexpected website behavior — such as broken pages, slower load times, or network-related errors. This article helps you understand what to do if something goes wrong during or after OTTO setup, and how to get help if issues persist. ⚙️ What OTTO Does to Your Site OTTO applies on-page and technical SEO optimizations automatically. If you notice unexpected website behavior after activating or deploying OTTO recommendations, it is worth checking whether the timing of the issue coincides with recent OTTO activity before assuming another cause. If you are experiencing network-level errors (such as 502 or 504 gateway timeouts, SSL failures, or DNS resolution issues), these are likely unrelated to OTTO and should be investigated with your hosting provider. 🚨 Is OTTO Causing My Website Errors? Before assuming OTTO is responsible for an issue, work through this quick checklist: 1. Check the timing. Did the errors begin within minutes of deploying OTTO recommendations? If the issue started hours or days later, OTTO is unlikely to be the cause. 2. Identify the error type. Page-level issues (broken layouts, missing content, redirects) could be related to OTTO changes. Server or network errors (5xx status codes, SSL warnings, DNS failures) are outside OTTO's scope. 3. Test a specific page. If only certain pages are affected, check whether OTTO made changes to those pages specifically. ↩️ Should I Restore My Site or Remove OTTO? In most cases, a full site restore is not necessary. Try these targeted steps first: - Review OTTO activity. Check your OTTO setup within Search Atlas to identify which recommendations were recently deployed and compare the deployment timing with when your errors first appeared. - Revert recent changes if possible. Depending on your setup, you may be able to undo recent OTTO-applied changes through your CMS or site backup before considering a full restore. - Use your CMS backup tools. If something looks wrong with your content, check your CMS revision history before performing a full site restore. - Perform a full restore only as a last resort. A full restore removes all OTTO progress and should only be considered if targeted reversions do not resolve the issue. 📋 What to Have Ready When Escalating If you are unable to resolve the issue on your own, please have the following information ready before reaching out to our team: - Your project or website name in Search Atlas - The exact error message or description of the unexpected behavior - The approximate date and time the issue first appeared - Any steps you have already taken to investigate or resolve the issue 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.

🔧 Fix OTTO Auto-Changing Root Domain to Subdomain

🔍 Overview When setting up an OTTO SEO project, the platform may automatically detect and pre-fill a subdomain (for example, services.yourdomain.com) instead of your root domain (yourdomain.com). This is a known bug that has been reported during OTTO project setup. This article explains what to expect and what information to have ready so our team can resolve this for you quickly. ⚙️ What Is Happening During OTTO project creation, the platform may automatically select a subdomain rather than the root domain you intended to use. This is not the expected behavior and requires a backend correction by our support team. There are no self-serve steps that reliably resolve this issue on your own. ⚠️ What to Do Because this issue requires action on the backend, please contact our support team as soon as you notice the domain has been set incorrectly. To help us resolve this as quickly as possible, please have the following information ready when you reach out: - Your OTTO project name as it appears in the platform. - The subdomain that was auto-detected (for example, services.yourdomain.com). - The correct root domain you want the project to use (for example, yourdomain.com). - The approximate date and time the project was created or when you first noticed the incorrect domain. Do not continue configuring the OTTO project with the incorrect domain in place, as this may affect the accuracy of your SEO data and recommendations. 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.

🔄 OTTO Weekly Analysis: Managing Recurring Recommendations

🤔 Why Did My Optimizations Disappear? If you applied AI-generated recommendations last week and noticed they were replaced or removed this week, OTTO's weekly analysis schedule is the cause. This is expected behaviour — not a bug or data loss. Each week, OTTO runs a fresh analysis of your site and regenerates its recommendations based on the latest crawl data, keyword performance, and ranking signals. This means the previous recommendation set is replaced with a new one. Any changes you applied from the old set remain live on your site, but they will no longer appear in OTTO's recommendation list because OTTO has moved on to its next analysis cycle. 📅 How the Weekly Analysis Schedule Works OTTO is designed to continuously monitor your site and surface the most relevant optimisations at any given time. Here is what happens during each weekly cycle: 1. OTTO crawls your connected site and collects fresh on-page, technical, and content data. 2. A new set of recommendations is generated based on the updated data. 3. The previous recommendation list is replaced with the new one. 4. Any optimisations you had already applied are retained on your site but are no longer shown as pending recommendations. This cycle ensures you are always working from the most current SEO intelligence rather than acting on outdated suggestions. ✅ What Happens to Changes You Already Applied It is important to understand that OTTO does not undo or remove changes you have already deployed to your site. When you accept and apply a recommendation, that change goes live and stays live. The disappearance you noticed is the recommendation card being removed from the OTTO interface — not the underlying SEO change being reversed. If you believe a live change was actually reverted on your site rather than simply removed from the recommendation list, check your CMS or page editor directly to confirm the content is still in place. If a change was genuinely undone, this would indicate a separate issue unrelated to the weekly schedule. 🔁 Why Recommendations Are Sometimes Regenerated for the Same Pages You may see OTTO suggest optimisations for pages it has recommended before. This can happen when: - A previously applied change was later edited or removed outside of OTTO. - New ranking data or competitor activity has shifted what is considered optimal for that page. - A technical issue such as a broken link or missing meta tag has reappeared after a site update. - OTTO has detected a new opportunity on the same page that was not present in the prior cycle. In these cases, acting on the new recommendation is the right course of action, even if the page looks familiar. ⚙️ Questions About the Analysis Schedule If the weekly regeneration cycle is causing confusion or you have questions about how OTTO's schedule applies to your specific project, our support team can look into the details of your account. When reaching out, please have the following ready: - The name of the project or site connected to OTTO. - The approximate date you last saw a recommendation set that has since been replaced. - A description of any specific recommendation or change you are trying to track down. 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.

🔧 Fix OTTO v3 Location Settings Reverting to Default

What's Happening Some users have reported that their OTTO v3 company location settings revert to a default value — often a UK location — after they have previously configured them. This can cause content generated by OTTO v3 to reflect the wrong country or region. How to Fix It Follow these steps to manually correct and re-save your OTTO v3 location settings: 1. Open your OTTO v3 project. From your Search Atlas dashboard, navigate to the project where the location is reverting. 2. Go to OTTO v3 Settings. Inside the project, locate the OTTO v3 configuration or settings section. 3. Find the Company Location or Business Location field. Look for the field that controls your company's country or region. This is the field that may be reverting to an incorrect default (e.g. a UK location). 4. Set the correct location. Select or type the correct country and/or region for your business. 5. Save your changes explicitly. Make sure to click the Save (or equivalent confirmation) button after updating the field. Do not navigate away before saving. 6. Re-activate OTTO v3 if prompted. In some cases, re-deploying or re-activating OTTO v3 on the project after saving ensures the updated location is applied to future content generation. 7. Verify the change persisted. Leave the settings page, then return to it and confirm the correct location is still displayed. If the Issue Persists If your location settings continue to revert after following the steps above, the root cause may be specific to your account or project configuration. Please have the following information ready when you contact support: - The name of the project or workspace where the location settings are reverting. - The location value that keeps appearing (e.g. the incorrect default country or region). - The correct location you need the settings to reflect. - Any steps you have already taken to try to fix the issue (e.g. re-saving settings). - Approximate date and time when you first noticed the reversion. 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.

🛠️ Troubleshoot Common OTTO Configuration Issues

🔍 Overview This article covers common OTTO configuration issues reported by Search Atlas users across five integration and feature areas: autopilot settings, product page indexing, Google Search Console connection, link deployment, and PPC keyword sync. Because the exact steps to resolve each issue depend on your specific project setup, the guidance below describes what to check and what information to have ready so our team can assist you as quickly as possible. ⚙️ Autopilot Setting Not Saving If OTTO's autopilot toggle keeps reverting or does not save, try the following general checks: - Confirm the change was saved: Some settings require an explicit save action after toggling. Make sure you complete any confirmation step on the page before navigating away. - Check for conflicting task-level settings: Individual task settings within your OTTO project may conflict with the global autopilot setting. Review your project's task-level configurations and clear any overrides before re-enabling autopilot. - Rule out a browser or session issue: Clear your browser cache, log out, log back in, and retry the toggle. If the issue persists after these checks, note the project name and a description of the behaviour you are seeing before reaching out to support. 📄 Product Pages Not Being Indexed If product pages are not getting indexed after OTTO deploys optimisations, consider the following: - Check page accessibility: Confirm the pages are publicly accessible and not blocked from being crawled or indexed, as OTTO cannot request indexing for pages that search engines cannot reach. - Confirm your GSC connection is active: Indexing requests depend on a working Google Search Console connection. See the section below if your GSC connection has an issue. - Allow time for processing: Indexing requests submitted through GSC are not instant. Check your OTTO project for the current submission state of the affected pages. If pages remain unindexed and you have ruled out the above, contact support with your project name and the specific URLs affected. 🔗 Google Search Console Not Connected A broken or missing GSC connection will prevent OTTO from pulling performance data and submitting indexing requests. General steps to investigate: - Open your OTTO project and check the connection status for your Google Search Console integration. - If the connection shows as disconnected or expired, initiate the reconnection flow using the Google account that has the appropriate access to the GSC property. - Make sure you select the correct GSC property that matches your site after reconnecting. If you are unable to reconnect GSC on your own, contact support with your project name and the Google account you are using for the integration. 🔗 Link Deployment Issues If links deployed by OTTO are not appearing on your site as expected, check the following: - Verify deployment status: Review your OTTO project to confirm whether the link tasks show a completed or pending status. Tasks that remain in a pending state have not yet been applied to your site. - Check site permissions: OTTO requires the necessary access to your site to deploy changes. Confirm that the integration connecting OTTO to your site is active and has not expired. - Review the target pages: Make sure the pages where links are being deployed are published and accessible. If links are still not deploying correctly after checking the above, contact support with your project name, the specific tasks affected, and a description of what you are seeing. 💰 PPC Keyword Sync Issues If PPC keywords are not syncing into OTTO as expected, check the following: - Confirm your PPC integration is connected: The keyword sync depends on an active connection between OTTO and your PPC account. Verify the integration is active in your project settings. - Allow time for syncing: After connecting or reconnecting a PPC account, keyword data may take some time to populate. Wait a short period and then refresh your project. - Check the correct account is linked: Make sure the PPC account connected to OTTO is the one that contains the keywords you expect to see. If keywords are still not syncing after these checks, contact support with your project name, the PPC account in question, and a description of the keywords or campaigns affected. 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. Additional Notes Autopilot settings are tied to active project state; changes made while paused won't commit. Check project status badge (must show Active). Also: URL Exclusion Patterns, Crawl Depth limit, and E-commerce Crawl Mode toggle for Shopify product page indexing.

🛠️ Fix OTTO Content Persisting After Removal

🔍 Overview When OTTO SEO deploys optimizations to your website — such as adding text like "24/7" to a page — it writes those changes through a synchronization layer that operates independently of the page editor. This means that simply editing or deleting the text in your page builder, or even deactivating the Search Atlas plugin, may not be enough to remove the deployed content from your site's frontend. This article explains why this happens and walks you through the correct steps to fully remove OTTO-deployed content. ⚙️ Why Does This Happen? OTTO deploys optimizations by pushing content through a metadata sync process, separate from what you see in your page builder (such as Elementor, Gutenberg, or another editor). Because of this architecture: - Deleting text directly in your page editor may not remove the value OTTO has stored in the background metadata fields. - Deactivating the Search Atlas plugin stops new deployments but does not automatically roll back content that has already been written to your site. - Cached versions of your pages may continue to serve the old content even after changes are made. ✅ How to Fully Remove OTTO-Deployed Content Follow these steps in order to ensure OTTO-deployed content is completely cleared from your site. 1. Log in to Search Atlas and navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) using the left sidebar. 2. Locate the deployed optimization you want to remove. Find the specific page and the optimization item (for example, the text element containing "24/7"). 3. Un-deploy the optimization by toggling it off or selecting the option to revert/remove the deployment. This is the critical step — it instructs OTTO to clear the metadata fields it originally wrote, rather than leaving them in place. 4. Confirm the change is reflected on your site by visiting the page on the frontend. Allow a few minutes for the update to propagate. 5. Clear your site's cache. If you use a caching plugin (such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache) or a CDN (such as Cloudflare), purge the cache for the affected page or your entire site to ensure visitors see the updated version. 6. Check your page builder. After un-deploying through OTTO, open the page in your editor and confirm the content no longer appears. If it remains, manually delete it as a final clean-up step. ⚠️ Important Notes - Deactivating the plugin is not the same as un-deploying. Always use the un-deploy action inside OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) before deactivating or uninstalling the Search Atlas plugin. - Cloudflare and CDN users: Deployments passing through Cloudflare DNS may take slightly longer to clear. After un-deploying, wait a few minutes and purge your CDN cache before checking the frontend. - Elementor users: In some cases, OTTO's H1 or content optimizations may interact with Elementor's rendering. If you notice display issues after un-deploying, re-save the affected page in Elementor to refresh its output. - Staging or subdomain environments: If you are working on a staging or subdomain setup, note that OTTO deployment behavior on these environments may differ. Contact support if you encounter unexpected persistence on a staging site. 🔄 Step-by-Step Summary 1. Go to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) in the left sidebar. 2. Find the optimization on the affected page. 3. Un-deploy the optimization through the OTTO interface. 4. Clear your site cache and CDN cache. 5. Verify the content is gone on the frontend. 6. Manually remove any remaining content in your page editor if needed. 💬 Still Seeing the Content? If you have followed all the steps above and the content is still appearing on your site's frontend, there may be a deeper caching or synchronization issue that requires investigation. 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.

🛠️ Fix Website Studio ws_bulk_send_message HTTP 403 Error

🔍 Overview If your ws_bulk_send_message MCP call is consistently returning an HTTP 403 error inside Website Studio — even when all other MCP calls are working correctly — you are likely experiencing a JWT authentication issue that affects how the bulk message tool connects to your project. This article explains what causes the error, how to identify it, and the steps to resolve it. ⚠️ What Triggers This Error The HTTP 403 error on ws_bulk_send_message is typically caused by one or more of the following: - Expired or invalid JWT token: The authentication token used by the MCP layer has expired or was not correctly passed to the bulk send endpoint. - Project-level permission mismatch: The MCP session credentials are not aligned with the specific Website Studio project you are targeting. - False failure reporting: In some cases, the message delivery may have actually succeeded, but the tool incorrectly reports a 403 failure due to a response-handling bug that has since been resolved. - Broken MCP tool initialisation: If create_project encountered an error earlier in your session, subsequent tools — including ws_bulk_send_message — can inherit a broken authentication state. ✅ How to Resolve the 403 Error 1. Refresh your MCP session. Log out of the Search Atlas platform completely, then log back in. This forces a new JWT token to be issued and clears any stale authentication state tied to your current session. 2. Re-open your Website Studio project. Navigate back to your project from the Website Studio dashboard rather than resuming from a cached or bookmarked URL. This ensures the MCP tools reinitialise with the correct project context and fresh credentials. 3. Retry the ws_bulk_send_message call. After re-entering the project, trigger the bulk send action again. In many cases, the 403 resolves immediately after the session is refreshed. 4. Verify the message was not already delivered. Due to the false-failure reporting bug (now resolved), your messages may have been sent successfully despite the 403 error appearing. Before re-sending, check your project's message history or the destination records to avoid duplicate updates. 5. Check for create_project errors earlier in your session. If you attempted to create a new project before the 403 appeared and received an error, start a new session entirely. A failed create_project call can corrupt the authentication context for all MCP tools that follow in the same session. 🔄 What Was Fixed on Our End Our engineering team has shipped several fixes related to this issue: - The JWT authentication flow for ws_bulk_send_message and other Website Studio MCP tools has been corrected to prevent token mismatch errors. - The create_project MCP tool, which was broken and contributing to downstream 403 failures, has been repaired. - False failure reporting on successful ws_bulk_send_message deliveries has been resolved — the tool now accurately reflects whether a message was sent. If you encountered this error before these fixes were deployed, refreshing your session as described above should be sufficient to restore full functionality. 🩺 Special Note for Healthcare and Data-Sensitive Projects If you are using Website Studio to manage critical records — such as physician profiles, patient-facing directories, or clinical data — we recommend confirming delivery success in your project's data view before re-triggering a bulk send. This prevents duplicate entries and ensures data integrity, particularly in cases where the 403 error was a false negative and the update had already been applied. 🚫 Common Mistakes to Avoid - Do not retry ws_bulk_send_message repeatedly in the same broken session. Multiple retries without refreshing the session will not resolve the 403 and may create duplicate processing attempts. - Do not assume data was not updated. As noted above, the error may have been cosmetic. Always check your records first. - Do not use a bookmarked deep link to re-enter a project after a session error. Always navigate from the main dashboard to ensure a clean initialisation. 💬 Still Seeing the Error? If you have followed all the steps above and the ws_bulk_send_message MCP call is still returning HTTP 403, our team can investigate your specific project and session logs. 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.

🌐 Change Your Otto Connected Domain Without Deletion

🔍 Overview Otto projects are tied to a connected domain at the time of setup. If you need to change that domain — for example, switching from islandcardio.com to island-cardio.com — you cannot modify the domain in-place. Otto does not currently support editing a connected domain after a project has been created. However, you can replace the domain quickly using the steps below, and your core project settings are straightforward to restore. ⚠️ Before You Begin - Changing a connected domain requires disconnecting the existing domain and reconnecting the correct one. - Any deployed Otto automations (meta tags, schema, redirects, etc.) tied to the old domain will no longer be managed by Otto once that domain is removed. - If the old domain is still live and indexed, review your SEO settings before disconnecting to avoid unintended changes to your site. - You will need access to your website's backend or CMS to re-verify the new domain. 🔄 How to Change Your Connected Domain 1. Go to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) using the left sidebar. 2. Open the Otto project that has the incorrect domain connected. 3. Locate the connected domain at the top of the project dashboard and click Disconnect Domain (or the equivalent remove/unlink option shown in your interface). 4. Confirm the disconnection when prompted. The project will enter an unconnected state — your project history and configuration remain saved. 5. Click Connect Domain (or Add Domain) and enter the correct domain — for example, island-cardio.com. 6. Follow the on-screen verification steps to confirm ownership of the new domain. This typically involves adding a DNS record or a verification tag to your site. 7. Once verified, the new domain will be active and Otto will begin analysing it. 8. Review your automation settings and re-deploy any fixes or optimisations that were previously applied to the old domain. 📋 What Is Retained vs. What Resets - Retained: Your Otto project name, connected GSC and GA4 accounts (if re-linked), and your subscription seat. - Resets: Previously deployed on-site changes are no longer tracked under the new domain. Otto will run a fresh audit against the new domain and surface a new set of recommendations. - Action required: If you had approved and deployed automations on the old domain, you will need to review and re-deploy the relevant fixes under the new domain's audit results. 🛡️ Handling Compromised or Overtaken Domains If you are changing domains because your original domain has been compromised, hacked, or taken over by a third party, take these additional steps: - Disconnect the compromised domain from Otto immediately to prevent Otto from deploying any further changes to a site you no longer control. - Do not reconnect the compromised domain even temporarily — connect your new or restored domain directly. - Revoke any API access or site verification tokens associated with the old domain through your DNS provider and Google Search Console. - After connecting the new domain, run a full Otto audit to establish a clean baseline for the replacement domain. 💡 Tips for a Smooth Domain Switch - If both domains (old and new) are live simultaneously during a migration, connect the destination domain and let Otto audit it before the old domain is retired. - Keep a record of the automations that were active on the old domain so you can prioritise re-deploying them on the new one. - After switching, allow 24–48 hours for Otto to complete its initial crawl and populate recommendations for the new domain. 🆘 Need Help? 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.

🖥️ Fix HTTP 413 Errors in OTTO SEO Previews

🔍 What Is the HTTP 413 Error in OTTO SEO? When you use OTTO SEO to preview changes on a large WordPress page, you may see an HTTP 413 (Content Too Large) error inside the preview window. This error can look alarming, but it does not mean your page is broken or that OTTO has failed to process your changes. The 413 error in this context means one thing: the page you are trying to preview is too large for OTTO's built-in preview window to load. It is a preview limitation only and has no effect on your live site or on OTTO's ability to deploy your SEO changes. ⚠️ Why This Happens OTTO SEO's preview window is a lightweight rendering environment designed to give you a quick visual check of your changes. It has a size limit on the content it can load at one time. Very large WordPress pages — for example, pages with heavyweight page builders, many embedded blocks, large images, or complex layouts — can exceed this limit and trigger the 413 error. This is not caused by: - Your server's PHP memory limit or upload settings - A security plugin blocking the request - A Web Application Firewall (WAF) rejecting traffic - Any misconfiguration on your WordPress site You do not need to change any server-side settings to resolve this issue. ✅ How Your Changes Are Still Applied Even when the preview fails with a 413 error, OTTO SEO continues to work normally in the background. When you deploy changes through OTTO, they are written directly to your WordPress site — the preview window is a separate step and does not control deployment. In short: a failed preview does not mean a failed deployment. Your SEO changes are still live on your site. 🛠️ What To Do Instead of Using the Preview If you see a 413 error in the OTTO preview, follow these steps to verify your changes were applied correctly: 1. Go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → SEO Automation (or navigate to /seo-automation-v3). 2. Confirm that the changes you intended to make are shown as deployed or active in the OTTO SEO dashboard. 3. Open your WordPress page directly in a new browser tab using your site's live URL. 4. Use your browser's built-in developer tools (right-click → Inspect → Elements or View Page Source) to confirm the SEO changes — such as updated meta titles, descriptions, or structured data — are present in the page code. 5. Optionally, use a third-party tool such as Google's Rich Results Test or a meta tag checker to verify the changes are visible externally. 📋 Quick Reference: Preview Error vs. Live Site - 413 error in preview window: The page is too large for the preview to render. This is expected for large or complex pages. - Live site deployment: Unaffected by the preview error. OTTO applies changes directly to your site regardless of preview status. - Server-side changes needed: None. Do not adjust PHP settings, disable security plugins, or modify WAF rules to fix this error. 🔄 When To Contact Support You should reach out to our team if: - Your OTTO dashboard shows the changes as not deployed or shows an error other than 413 in the preview. - You have confirmed the changes are deployed in OTTO but they do not appear on your live site after a reasonable time. - You are seeing the 413 error on pages that are not unusually large or complex. 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.

🔗 Fix UTM Parameter Overrides in Google Ads

🔍 Overview If you've noticed that your utm_campaign or other UTM parameters are being changed or removed inside Google Ads, this is most likely caused by the OTTO PPC feature automatically applying a URL prefix or ValueTrack parameter to your campaigns. This article explains why it happens and how to fix it. ⚙️ Why This Happens OTTO PPC can automatically update the Account-level URL prefix in Google Ads to enable enhanced tracking. In some cases, this process may: - Overwrite existing UTM parameters you've set manually on your campaigns or ad groups. - Apply a malformed {ignore} ValueTrack parameter that breaks the URL prefix, causing tracking to fail or behave unexpectedly. - Conflict with UTM values already defined at the campaign, ad group, or ad level in Google Ads. Google Ads applies URL parameters in a specific order of precedence — account level, then campaign level, then ad group level, then ad level. When OTTO PPC writes to the account-level URL prefix, it can silently override more specific settings you've configured lower in that hierarchy. 🛠️ How to Fix the Override Follow these steps to resolve UTM parameter conflicts between Search Atlas and your Google Ads account. 1. Check your Account-level URL prefix in Google Ads. In Google Ads, go to Admin > Account Settings > Tracking and review the value in the Tracking template or Final URL suffix field. Look for any unexpected parameters or a malformed {ignore} tag inserted by OTTO PPC. 2. Remove or correct the malformed {ignore} parameter. If you see something like {ignore}?utm_source=… or a broken URL string, delete the malformed portion and restore your intended UTM parameters. Save the changes in Google Ads. 3. Review OTTO PPC tracking settings in Search Atlas. Inside Search Atlas, navigate to your OTTO PPC dashboard and locate the Tracking or URL Settings section. Verify what value OTTO is configured to push as the URL prefix. 4. Align your UTM parameters in one place. To avoid future conflicts, define your UTM parameters at a single level — either through OTTO PPC or directly in Google Ads, but not both. If you prefer to manage UTM parameters manually in Google Ads, disable or clear the URL prefix setting inside OTTO PPC. 5. Test your tracking URLs. After making changes, use the Google Ads URL Tester (found under Admin > Account Settings > Tracking) or a tool like Google Tag Assistant to confirm your final URLs are resolving correctly with the expected UTM values. ✅ Best Practices to Prevent Future Conflicts - Use one source of truth for UTM parameters. Decide whether OTTO PPC or your Google Ads account owns UTM tracking, and stick to one approach consistently. - Audit your URL prefix after enabling OTTO PPC. Whenever you activate or update OTTO PPC for an account, immediately verify that your account-level URL prefix in Google Ads still contains the correct parameters. - Avoid duplicate UTM keys across levels. If utm_campaign is set at the account level, do not also set it at the campaign or ad level — Google Ads will attempt to apply both, which can produce unexpected results. - Document your tracking setup. Keep a record of which UTM parameters are managed by Search Atlas versus Google Ads so that any team member can quickly diagnose future issues. 💡 Frequently Asked Questions Will disabling the OTTO PPC URL prefix break my conversion tracking? No. Conversion tracking in Google Ads relies on your Google tag or Google Click ID (gclid), not on UTM parameters. Removing the URL prefix only affects UTM-based reporting in tools like Google Analytics. Does Search Atlas automatically re-apply the URL prefix after I remove it? OTTO PPC may re-apply its URL prefix setting during its next optimization cycle. If this keeps happening, disable the URL prefix feature within OTTO PPC settings or contact support for guidance on permanently excluding it. My UTM parameters look correct in Search Atlas but wrong in Google Ads — why? There is often a sync delay between Search Atlas and Google Ads. Allow up to 24 hours for changes to propagate. If the issue persists after 24 hours, follow the steps in the How to Fix the Override section above. 🆘 Need More Help? 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO Stuck on 301-Redirect Domains

🔍 Overview When your domain uses a 301 redirect (for example, redirecting http:// to https://, or non-www to www, or a trailing-slash variant), OTTO's homepage discovery process can fail silently. The result is a project that stays stuck in Processing for 72 hours or longer, and a dashboard message reading OTTO not found — even though the OTTO script is correctly installed and visible in your rendered DOM. This article explains why this happens, how to confirm it is the cause, and the steps you can take right now to get OTTO running. ⚙️ Why This Happens OTTO's homepage discovery engine sends an initial request to the URL you registered during project setup. If that URL returns a 301 redirect, the crawler follows the redirect chain to reach the final destination page. Under certain server and CMS configurations — particularly WordPress sites — the redirect strips the query string that OTTO appends to its internal fetch request. This causes the crawler to land on an unexpected page, crawl 0 pages, and throw a PageImportException error internally. Because no pages are successfully crawled, OTTO cannot confirm the script installation and marks the project as unresolvable. Common redirect scenarios that trigger this issue include: - http → https redirects where the server drops query parameters - non-www → www (or www → non-www) redirects - Trailing-slash redirects (e.g., example.com/page → example.com/page/) - WordPress permalink redirects that lose incoming query strings mid-chain ✅ How to Confirm This Is Your Issue 1. Go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) (URL: /seo-automation-v3). 2. Locate your project and check its status. If it shows Processing and has been in that state for more than a few hours, or shows OTTO not found, this redirect issue is a likely cause. 3. In a browser, paste your registered domain URL into the address bar and press Enter. Watch the address bar — if the URL changes at all (protocol, subdomain, or trailing slash), a 301 redirect is active on your homepage. 4. Confirm your OTTO script is present by right-clicking your homepage, selecting Inspect, and searching the DOM for the OTTO script tag. If it appears, the script is installed correctly and the problem is the redirect, not the installation. 🛠️ Steps to Resolve the Issue 1. Identify the final, canonical URL of your homepage. This is the URL your browser settles on after all redirects complete (check the address bar). For example, if you entered http://example.com and landed on https://www.example.com/, the canonical URL is https://www.example.com/. 2. Update your OTTO project to use the canonical URL. Navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation), select your project, and open project settings, and ensure the domain registered matches the final destination URL exactly — including the correct protocol (https), subdomain (www or non-www), and trailing slash if applicable. 3. Verify your server preserves query strings through redirects. If you manage your own server or WordPress installation, check that your redirect rules (in .htaccess, Nginx config, or a redirect plugin) pass query parameters to the destination URL. A correct Apache rule looks like: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L,QSA] — note the QSA flag (Query String Append). 4. Re-trigger homepage discovery. After correcting the registered URL or the redirect configuration, go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation), select your project, and use the Refresh data action to restart the discovery process. 5. Wait up to 30 minutes for the new crawl to complete. If the project moves from Processing to an active state and the OTTO dashboard populates data, the issue is resolved. 🚫 What Not to Do - Do not register a URL that still redirects. OTTO must be pointed at the final destination URL, not an intermediate one. - Do not reinstall the OTTO script if it is already present in the rendered DOM — reinstalling will not fix a redirect-related discovery failure. - Do not wait longer than 24 hours after making changes without re-triggering the crawl manually. The system will not automatically retry indefinitely. 📊 Known Limitations and Fixes in Progress Our engineering team has identified and addressed several related issues: - A fix for the core PageImportException / 0 pages crawled error on reachable sites is currently in release. - A fix for WordPress redirect configurations that drop OTTO's query string is awaiting release. - Improvements to homepage detection speed (splitting JavaScript rendering from discovery) and canonical URL resolution (www vs non-www) have already been deployed. Once the remaining fixes are fully released, many of these scenarios will be handled automatically. Until then, following the manual steps above will unblock your project. 💬 Still Need Help? 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO 'Not Found' on Redirect Sites

🔍 Overview If your OTTO site scan shows "OTTO not found" even though the OTTO pixel script is present in your website's source code, the most common cause is a homepage redirect. When OTTO's crawler follows a redirect from your root domain to a different URL (such as a subdomain, a subfolder, or a campaign page), it may land on a page where the pixel is not installed — causing the scan to fail. This article explains why this happens, how to confirm it is the cause, and what steps you can take to get your site scanning successfully. ⚙️ Why This Happens When OTTO scans your site, it starts by fetching your homepage. If your homepage redirects to another URL, OTTO follows that redirect and checks the final destination page for its pixel. Common redirect scenarios that trigger this issue include: - Your root domain (e.g., example.com) redirects to a subdomain (e.g., www.example.com or services.example.com) - Your homepage redirects to a country or language subfolder (e.g., example.com/en/) - A WordPress or server configuration causes OTTO's fetch to land on an unexpected page - The pixel is installed only on the root domain page, not on the redirect destination In these cases, OTTO may report it cannot reach the homepage or detect the pixel, even though a standard browser visit works fine. ✅ How to Confirm a Redirect Is the Cause 1. Open a browser and navigate to the domain you registered in OTTO. 2. Note the URL shown in your browser's address bar after the page fully loads. If it differs from the domain you entered in OTTO, a redirect is occurring. 3. Right-click the final page and select View Page Source. Search for the OTTO pixel script. If the pixel is absent on the redirect destination, that confirms the problem. 🛠️ Steps to Fix the Issue 1. Install the OTTO pixel on the redirect destination. Identify the final URL your homepage redirects to and ensure the OTTO pixel script is present in the <head> section of that page. This is the most reliable fix in most cases. 2. Verify the pixel on all key pages. If your site uses multiple redirects or regional subfolders, confirm the pixel is present across all pages you want OTTO to manage. 3. Check your redirect settings. If your site runs on WordPress or another CMS, review any redirect plugins or server configuration settings that may be causing unexpected redirect behavior. 4. Re-run the OTTO scan. After installing or confirming the pixel on the redirect destination, trigger a new scan in OTTO to verify the pixel is now detected successfully. 📋 When to Escalate If you have confirmed the pixel is present on the redirect destination but OTTO still reports it as not found, please contact support. When reaching out, have the following ready: - The exact domain you registered in OTTO - The final URL your homepage redirects to - Confirmation of where the pixel is installed (e.g., a link to the page source) - Any error messages or scan results shown in OTTO 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.

🛠️ Fix Website Studio Editor Not Loading

🔍 What Is This Issue? Some customers have reported that clicking into a Website Studio project loads the left sidebar but fails to render the main editor. The page may appear blank, white, or frozen — with no content visible beyond the sidebar. In some cases, no network requests fire at all, meaning the editor never fully initialises. This issue has been identified and investigated by the Search Atlas engineering team. If you are still experiencing this behaviour, the steps below will help you recover access. 🧭 How to Get to Website Studio Before troubleshooting, confirm you are navigating to the correct location: 1. Log in to your Search Atlas account. 2. In the left sidebar, click Website Studio. 3. Select the project you want to open. The URL should contain /website-studio. ⚙️ Steps to Fix the Editor Not Loading Work through the steps below in order, testing the editor after each one before moving to the next. 1. Hard-refresh the page. Press Ctrl + Shift + R (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + Shift + R (Mac) to clear cached assets and force a full reload. 2. Clear your browser cache and cookies. Stale cached files are a common cause of the editor failing to initialise. Clear cache for the past 24 hours, then reload the page. 3. Try an incognito or private window. Open a new incognito window, log in to Search Atlas, and navigate to your Website Studio project. This rules out browser extensions or local storage conflicts. 4. Switch browsers. If the editor still fails to load, try a different browser (for example, Chrome, Firefox, or Edge). This confirms whether the issue is browser-specific. 5. Disable browser extensions. Ad blockers, script blockers, or privacy extensions can prevent API calls from firing. Temporarily disable all extensions and reload the editor. 6. Check your internet connection. A slow or unstable connection can cause the editor to stall mid-load. Test on a different network if possible. 7. Wait a few minutes and try again. If a platform update was recently deployed, a brief delay before retrying can be enough for the environment to stabilise. 📋 If the Issue Persists — What to Have Ready If the editor still fails to load past the sidebar after completing all steps above, this may require investigation by the Search Atlas engineering team. Before reaching out, please collect the following information so our team can investigate as quickly as possible: - Project name — the exact name of the Website Studio project that fails to load. - Browser and version — for example, Chrome 124, Firefox 126, or Edge 123. - Operating system — for example, Windows 11 or macOS Ventura. - Exact behaviour observed — describe what you see (e.g. blank white screen past the sidebar, page freezes, no content loads). - Timestamp — the date and approximate time (including your timezone) when the issue occurred. - Whether the issue occurs in incognito or a different browser — this helps isolate the cause. 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.

Bulk Editing FAQ Issues in OTTO SEO

Overview If your site has many FAQ-related issues flagged across multiple pages, working through them one by one can feel slow. This article explains what bulk editing capabilities currently exist in OTTO SEO, what does not exist, how plan limitations may affect your options, and practical tips to move faster within the current interface. What Does Not Exist — Setting the Record Straight To avoid confusion, the following features are not available in OTTO SEO at this time: - A bulk deploy workflow that pushes all FAQ answers at once - A single-click button that auto-populates and deploys every FAQ issue simultaneously - A dedicated FAQ table review screen that loads all issues before the editing modal opens If you were previously told any of these options exist, we apologise for the confusion. The information was incorrect. What You Can Actually Do Today Within the current OTTO SEO interface, you can work through FAQ-type issues by opening each flagged item individually, reviewing any suggested answer, editing if needed, and deploying one item at a time. You may also be able to filter issues by category to help isolate a specific type of FAQ issue and work through a more focused batch. Contact our team for guidance on the exact steps available in your account. Plan Limitations and FAQ Editing The scope of FAQ issue detection and the volume of issues surfaced in OTTO SEO may vary depending on your current plan. If you find that certain audit categories are unavailable, that issue counts appear capped, or that specific editing features are not accessible in your account, this may be related to your plan tier. To understand exactly which features and issue types are included in your plan, review your account settings or reach out to our team for a plan comparison. Practical Tips to Work Faster While true bulk editing is not available, these habits can help reduce the time you spend per issue: 1. Prioritise by page impact first. Focus on pages with the highest number of flagged issues before moving to lower-priority pages. 2. Accept suggestions when they are accurate. If a suggested answer looks correct, accepting it without editing is the fastest path through the queue. 3. Keep your business information current. The more complete and up-to-date your account's business details are, the better any generated suggestions tend to be, reducing the need to manually rewrite answers. 4. Work in focused sessions by issue type. Isolate one issue type at a time to avoid context-switching and move through a batch more efficiently. 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.

🛠️ Fix HTTP Redirects and 404 Errors in Website Studio

🔍 Overview Some Website Studio users have noticed two related issues with their published sites: inconsistent HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects that route visitors to an unexpected /welcome page, and invalid URLs returning raw XML error messages (such as a NoSuchKey response) instead of a clean 404 or homepage redirect. This article explains what causes these issues, what has been fixed, and what you can do right now to minimise disruption for your visitors. ⚠️ What These Issues Look Like - Visiting the HTTP version of your site (e.g. http://yourdomain.com) redirects inconsistently — sometimes landing on /welcome instead of your homepage. - Typing a URL that does not exist on your site (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/page-that-doesnt-exist) returns a raw XML error response containing text like NoSuchKey rather than a friendly 404 page or a redirect to your homepage. - Visitors see a broken or confusing dead-end instead of being guided back to your content. 🧩 Why This Happens Website Studio sites are hosted on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Two specific CDN-level behaviours were responsible for these errors: - Inconsistent HTTP redirect rule: The rule that forwards HTTP traffic to the secure HTTPS version of your site was not firing reliably, causing some requests to land on an internal /welcome route instead of your homepage. - Missing custom error handling: When a visitor requests a URL that does not exist, the CDN returned its default raw XML error response instead of a branded 404 page or a redirect back to your homepage. This is a poor experience and can confuse visitors and search engines alike. ✅ What Has Been Fixed Our engineering team has resolved both of these issues at the platform level: 1. HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect — The redirect rule has been corrected so that all HTTP requests consistently forward to the HTTPS version of your homepage, with no unexpected stops at /welcome. 2. Invalid URL error handling — The raw XML NoSuchKey response has been replaced with proper error-state handling. Visitors who land on a non-existent URL will now see a clean error page rather than raw server output. These fixes are applied automatically to all Website Studio sites hosted on our CDN. No action is required on your part for the core fixes to take effect. 🔧 Steps to Verify Your Site Is Working Correctly 1. Open a browser and visit the HTTP version of your domain (e.g. http://yourdomain.com). Confirm it redirects to the HTTPS homepage without stopping at /welcome. 2. Test an invalid URL on your site (e.g. https://yourdomain.com/this-page-does-not-exist). You should see a clean error page — not raw XML text. 3. Clear your browser cache and repeat both tests to rule out cached responses. 4. If you use a third-party DNS provider, confirm that your CNAME or A record still points to the correct Search Atlas CDN endpoint. Stale DNS records can cause redirects to behave unexpectedly. 💡 Best Practices to Avoid Future Redirect Issues - Always publish your site through Website Studio after making domain changes. Republishing triggers a fresh CDN configuration for your site. - Use HTTPS links everywhere — in your internal links, social profiles, and any external references to your site. Relying on HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects for regular traffic adds an unnecessary step and can introduce latency. - Check your site after domain changes. Any time you update your custom domain settings, run through the verification steps above to catch redirect issues early. - Monitor for XML error responses by periodically testing a few invalid URLs on your site, especially after a republish. ❓ Frequently Asked Questions Will this affect my SEO? Temporary redirect inconsistencies and raw error responses can cause search engines to misindex pages. Now that the fixes are in place, search engines will correctly follow the HTTPS redirect and receive proper error codes for missing pages. If your site was affected for an extended period, allow a few weeks for search engines to re-crawl and update their index. Do I need to set up custom redirects myself? No. The HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect and basic error handling are managed automatically by the platform. You do not need to configure these manually in Website Studio. What if I still see the /welcome page or raw XML errors after the fix? First, clear your browser and DNS cache. If the problem persists, the issue may be specific to your domain configuration. Contact support using the instructions below. 🆘 Still Experiencing Issues? If you have followed the steps above and are still seeing inconsistent redirects or raw XML error responses on your site, our team is ready to help. 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.

🔧 OTTO SEO Common Issues & Troubleshooting Guide

What Is OTTO SEO? OTTO SEO is Search Atlas's on-site optimization tool. It audits your website, generates SEO recommendations, and helps you deploy fixes to improve your site's performance. Where to Find Your Domain Key Number (DKN) Your Domain Key Number (DKN) is a unique identifier that links your website to your OTTO SEO workspace. To locate your DKN: 1. Log in to your Search Atlas account. 2. Navigate to the OTTO SEO section from the main dashboard. 3. Select the project or domain you want to work with. 4. Look for your Domain Key Number (DKN) within that project's area. 5. Copy the DKN and keep it handy — you will need it when installing the OTTO SEO plugin on your website. If you cannot locate your DKN after following the steps above, note your project/domain name and contact support for help pinpointing the exact location in your account. Common OTTO SEO Issues & Self-Serve Troubleshooting Before reaching out to support, try the following steps for the most common OTTO SEO problems: - OTTO not connecting: Confirm you have entered the correct DKN in the plugin settings on your website. Double-check for extra spaces or typos when copying the DKN. - No recommendations appearing: Ensure the site audit has fully completed — this can take several minutes after connection. Refresh the OTTO SEO dashboard and check again once the audit status shows as complete. - Changes not deploying: Verify that the OTTO SEO plugin is active and up to date on your website. Deactivating and reactivating the plugin can resolve connection issues that prevent deployment. - Plugin installation issues: Confirm your site meets the plugin requirements and that no conflicting plugins are interfering. Check your WordPress (or relevant CMS) plugin list for conflicts. When to Contact Support If the self-serve steps above do not resolve your issue, please have the following ready when you reach out: - The domain name or project name you are working with - Your Domain Key Number (DKN), if you have been able to locate it - A description of the exact issue you are experiencing (e.g., OTTO not connecting, no recommendations appearing, changes not deploying) - Any error messages you have seen, including the exact wording - The date and time when the issue first occurred 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.

🔧 Otto Tool Failed Message Troubleshooting Guide

🤔 What Does the 'Failed' Message Mean? When Otto — Search Atlas's OTTO SEO automation tool — displays a Failed status next to your connected site, it means Otto encountered an interruption while crawling or processing your site's data. This does not mean your site has been disconnected or that any previously applied optimizations have been lost. In most cases, this is a known display glitch triggered by a temporary timeout or a brief server-side interruption during the crawl process. Your site connection remains intact, and the issue is fully recoverable by initiating a fresh recrawl. ⚠️ Why Does This Happen? The Failed status can appear for several common reasons: - A temporary timeout occurred while Otto was crawling your site. - A brief server interruption affected the data processing pipeline. - Your site returned an unexpected response during the crawl (for example, a momentary slowdown or blocked request). - The crawl session was interrupted before it could complete successfully. None of these causes indicate a problem with your site's SEO health or your Search Atlas account. A recrawl resolves the issue in the vast majority of cases. 🛠️ How to Fix It: Step-by-Step Recrawl Instructions Follow these steps to clear the Failed status and restart the Otto crawl for your site: 1. Log in to your Search Atlas account and navigate to OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) using the left sidebar. 2. Locate the site showing the Failed status in your Otto dashboard. 3. Click on the site to open its Otto settings and overview panel. 4. Look for the Recrawl Site button on the Overview (Website Overview) page and click it. 5. Confirm the action if prompted. Otto will immediately queue a fresh crawl for your site. 6. Wait for the crawl to complete. The status will update automatically once Otto finishes processing. You do not need to disconnect or reconnect your site. Initiating the recrawl is all that is required. ⏱️ How Long Will the Recrawl Take? Recrawl times vary depending on the size of your site and current system load. As a general guide: - Small sites (under 100 pages): typically 5–15 minutes. - Medium sites (100–1,000 pages): typically 15–45 minutes. - Large sites (1,000+ pages): may take up to a few hours. Once the recrawl is complete, the Failed status will be replaced with an active status and your Otto data will be refreshed. You do not need to stay on the page while the crawl runs — you can navigate away and return later to check the updated status. ✅ After the Recrawl Completes When the recrawl finishes successfully, you should see: - The site status updated from Failed to an active crawl status. - Refreshed site data, including updated page counts and SEO opportunity summaries. - All previously deployed Otto optimizations still in place — a recrawl does not remove or reset any changes Otto has already applied to your site. If the Failed status reappears after the recrawl completes, try running a second recrawl. Persistent failures after two attempts may indicate a site accessibility issue that requires further investigation. 🆘 Still Seeing the Failed Status? If the Failed message persists after one or two recrawl attempts, it may point to a deeper connectivity issue between Otto and your site — for example, your site blocking the Otto crawler or an authentication problem. In this situation, our team can investigate directly. 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.

🗺️ Fix Google Maps Embeds in Otto Site Setup

🔍 Overview When setting up a new Otto site with a Google Business Profile (GBP) link, you may encounter a Google Embedded Map error. This happens because Otto requires a specific iframe embed code — not a standard Google Maps URL. This article walks you through generating the correct embed code and configuring it properly in your Otto site setup. ⚠️ Why the Error Occurs Otto's site builder expects a Google Maps iframe embed code to display your location map. Common causes of the error include: - Pasting a regular Google Maps URL (e.g., https://maps.google.com/...) instead of an iframe code - Using a Google Business Profile link directly - Copying a shortened or redirect URL from the browser address bar None of the above formats are compatible with the embedded map field. You must use the iframe code generated directly from Google Maps. 🛠️ How to Get Your Google Maps Iframe Embed Code 1. Go to Google Maps at maps.google.com in your browser. 2. Search for your business name or address until your location pin appears. 3. Click on your business listing to open the location panel on the left side of the screen. 4. Click the Share button (the icon with an arrow pointing outward) in the location panel. 5. In the Share dialog, select the Embed a map tab. 6. Choose your preferred map size from the dropdown menu (Medium is recommended for most Otto layouts). 7. Click Copy HTML to copy the full iframe code to your clipboard. The copied code will look similar to this: This is the correct format Otto expects. ⚙️ How to Add the Embed Code in Otto Site Setup 1. Navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) using the left sidebar, or go directly to /seo-automation-v3. 2. Open your Otto site setup and locate the Google Embedded Map field. 3. Paste the full iframe code you copied from Google Maps into this field. 4. Do not modify or shorten the code — paste it exactly as copied. 5. Save your changes and preview your site to confirm the map loads correctly. ✅ Quick Checklist Before You Save - The code starts with <iframe and ends with - The URL inside the src attribute contains maps/embed — not a redirect or short link - You have not manually edited any part of the code - You are not pasting a GBP profile URL or a browser address bar URL 💡 Tips and Common Mistakes - GBP links are not embed codes. Your Google Business Profile URL is separate from the embeddable map iframe. Always generate the embed code directly from Google Maps using the steps above. - Avoid browser URL copying. The URL in your browser's address bar when viewing a location on Google Maps is not compatible with the embed field. - Check for extra spaces. Occasionally, copying from certain browsers may add a leading space before the iframe tag. Remove any whitespace before the opening < character. - Map not showing after save? Clear your browser cache and reload the site preview. Embedded maps can sometimes take a moment to render on first load. 🆘 Need More Help? 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.

📶 UX Signals: What OTTO Can and Cannot Do

📌 What Are UX Signals? UX signals are behavioral metrics that indicate how visitors experience your website. Search engines use these signals as quality indicators when ranking pages. Common UX signals include: - Page load speed — how quickly your pages render for users - Core Web Vitals — Google's set of performance metrics (LCP, INP, CLS) - Mobile usability — how well your site functions on mobile devices - Bounce rate and dwell time — whether visitors stay and engage with your content - Interactivity — how smoothly users can click, scroll, and navigate 🤖 What OTTO Does and Does Not Optimize OTTO is Search Atlas's OTTO SEO automation engine. It is designed to handle on-page and technical SEO tasks that can be managed through content and metadata — not through changes to your website's underlying code, server configuration, or design. OTTO can optimize: - Title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structure - Internal linking and anchor text - Schema markup and structured data - Content gaps and keyword targeting - Image alt text - Canonical tags and robots directives OTTO cannot optimize: - Page load speed or server response times - Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS scores) - JavaScript rendering performance - Mobile layout and responsive design - Font loading, image compression pipelines, or CSS efficiency - Hosting infrastructure or CDN configuration UX signal improvements require changes at the website level — in your code, design, hosting, or development stack. These fall outside OTTO's automation scope and must be addressed directly on your site or with the help of a developer. 🔍 How to Find Your Current UX Signal Scores To review your site's UX signals inside Search Atlas: 1. In the left sidebar, navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation). 2. Select your project and open the site audit or performance overview. 3. Look for Core Web Vitals, page speed scores, and mobile usability flags in the audit results. 4. Each flagged issue will include a description of what is underperforming. You can also use Google's free tools — PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console — to get a detailed breakdown of your Core Web Vitals and mobile usability issues alongside field data from real users. 🛠️ How to Improve Your UX Signals The following changes are the most impactful for improving UX signals and must be implemented at the website or hosting level: Improve page load speed: - Compress and serve images in next-gen formats (WebP, AVIF) - Enable browser caching and GZIP or Brotli compression on your server - Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files - Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce latency for global visitors Improve Core Web Vitals: - LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Optimize your largest above-the-fold element — usually a hero image or heading. Preload critical resources and eliminate render-blocking scripts. - INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Reduce JavaScript execution time and break up long tasks that block the main thread. - CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Set explicit width and height attributes on images and embeds so the browser reserves space before they load. Improve mobile usability: - Use a responsive design framework and test all pages on multiple screen sizes - Ensure tap targets (buttons, links) are large enough and spaced apart - Avoid intrusive pop-ups or interstitials on mobile Improve engagement signals: - Make sure your page content matches the intent of the search query driving traffic - Improve readability with clear headings, short paragraphs, and relevant visuals - Reduce time-to-first-meaningful-content so visitors see value immediately ✅ Recommended Workflow 1. Run a full site audit in Search Atlas (OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation)) to identify specific UX signal issues. 2. Cross-reference findings with PageSpeed Insights for lab and field data. 3. Prioritize fixes by impact — Core Web Vitals failures tend to have the largest ranking effect. 4. Work with your developer or hosting provider to implement the required changes. 5. Re-run the audit after changes go live to confirm improvements. 6. Let OTTO handle all on-page SEO tasks in parallel so both tracks progress simultaneously. 💬 Need Help? 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.

⚡ Bulk Generate AI Fixes in OTTO SEO

🧭 Overview OTTO SEO's Bulk Actions feature lets you select up to 100 tasks at once and generate AI suggested fixes in a single click. If you are managing hundreds of tasks, this workflow will save you significant time compared to handling each row individually. You can also use the Atlas Agent chat for broader guidance, but the built-in Bulk Actions feature is the fastest way to generate fixes at scale. 🗂️ Step 1: Open OTTO SEO 1. Log in to your Search Atlas account. 2. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → SEO Automation (All Sites). The URL will change to /seo-automation-v3. 3. Select the project you want to work on from the project switcher at the top of the page. 4. You will land on the OTTO SEO task list, which displays all outstanding SEO tasks organised by category. ✅ Step 2: Select Multiple Tasks 1. Locate the checkbox column on the far left of the task list table. 2. Click the checkbox next to each task you want to include. You can select up to 100 tasks per batch. 3. To select tasks faster, use the Select All checkbox in the column header. This selects all tasks visible on the current page (up to 100 rows). 4. If you need to filter first, use the category filters or status filters above the task list to narrow results before selecting. This helps you target a specific task type, such as missing meta descriptions or broken headings, in one batch. ⚙️ Step 3: Generate AI Suggested Fixes in Bulk 1. Once your tasks are selected, a Bulk Actions toolbar will appear at the top or bottom of the task list. 2. Click the Bulk Actions button or dropdown. 3. Select Generate AI Suggested Fix from the available options. 4. Confirm the action when prompted. OTTO SEO will begin generating AI suggested fixes for all selected tasks simultaneously. 5. Wait for the generation to complete. Depending on the number of tasks selected, this may take a few moments. The task list will update automatically when fixes are ready. 🔄 Step 4: Handle More Than 100 Tasks Because each batch is limited to 100 tasks, you will need to repeat the process if you have a larger volume, such as 500 tasks. Here is the most efficient approach: 1. Apply a filter to isolate a specific task category or status so your task list shows a manageable subset. 2. Select all tasks on the page using the header checkbox. 3. Run Generate AI Suggested Fix via Bulk Actions. 4. Once that batch is complete, clear the selection, move to the next page or adjust the filter, and repeat. 5. Continue until all task categories have been processed. Working category by category keeps batches organised and makes it easier to review fixes before approving them. 🤖 Alternative: Use Atlas Agent for Guided Assistance If you prefer a conversational approach or need help deciding which tasks to prioritise, Atlas Agent can assist you directly inside the platform. - Open the Atlas Agent chat panel within OTTO SEO. - Ask Atlas Agent to identify high-impact tasks or suggest a processing order for your specific site. - Atlas Agent can provide recommendations, but you will still use the Bulk Actions workflow described above to generate the actual fixes at scale. Atlas Agent is a useful companion for strategy, but Bulk Actions is the primary tool for generating fixes efficiently across large task volumes. ✍️ Step 5: Review and Apply Fixes 1. After generation, each task will display its AI suggested fix in the task detail panel. 2. Review the suggestions to confirm they match your content style and SEO goals. 3. Use Bulk Approve (if available for your plan) to apply multiple accepted fixes at once, or approve them individually as needed. 4. Tasks that have been approved and applied will move to a Completed or Resolved status, keeping your task list current. 💡 Tips for Working With Large Task Volumes - Filter before you select. Narrowing by category first ensures your 100-task batch is focused and easier to review. - Work highest-impact tasks first. Prioritise tasks flagged as critical or those affecting your most-visited pages. - Do not skip the review step. AI suggested fixes are a strong starting point, but a quick review ensures the output aligns with your brand voice and technical requirements. - Check task status after each batch. Refreshing the list confirms that fixes generated correctly before you move to the next batch. 🆘 Need Help? 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.

🔄 Separate Accounts and Migrate Your OTTO Project

🔍 Overview If your email is linked to someone else's Search Atlas account and you need your own independent account — along with an OTTO project transferred to it — this article walks you through what to expect and how to get it done quickly. Because account separation and OTTO project migrations involve backend changes by our team, this process cannot be completed entirely through the platform UI. However, understanding the steps will help you move through it efficiently. ⚙️ Step 1: Request Removal from the Shared Account You cannot remove yourself from another user's account on your own — this requires action from our support team. To get started: 1. Open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform. 2. Type human teammate to connect with a member of our team. 3. Let the agent know that your email address is currently associated with another user's account and that you need to be removed from it. 4. Provide your email address and, if possible, the account owner's email or domain so the team can locate the correct account. Our team will process the removal from the shared account on your behalf. You do not need to take any action inside the platform for this step. 🆕 Step 2: Create Your Own Search Atlas Account Once your email has been removed from the shared account, our support team will enable account creation for your email address. After that: 1. Go to the Search Atlas sign-up page. 2. Register using your email address. 3. If you do not receive a confirmation or encounter any issues during sign-up, return to the chat and let the agent know — they can confirm that your email has been cleared and is ready for registration. Do not attempt to create a new account before the removal from the previous account has been confirmed, as this may cause a conflict. 🚀 Step 3: Request Your OTTO Project Migration After your new account is active, our team can migrate your existing OTTO project — including all associated data — from the old account to your new one. This is a backend operation handled by our specialists. 1. Open the chat widget and type human teammate. 2. Tell the agent you need an OTTO project migrated to your new account. 3. Provide the following details: - The domain of the OTTO project you want transferred (for example, yoursite.com) - The email address of the old account the project currently lives under - The email address of your new account where it should be moved 4. Our team will log a formal migration request and process the transfer. Important: Do not make changes to the OTTO project in the old account while the migration is in progress. Wait for confirmation from the support team before taking any action on the project in either account. ✅ Step 4: Confirm the Migration Was Successful Once our team confirms the migration is complete, log in to your new account and navigate to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Overview to verify that your OTTO project appears and is active. If the project does not appear or you notice any issues with the domain after migration, let the support team know right away so they can investigate. 💡 Tips to Avoid Issues - Complete the steps in order — account removal first, then new account creation, then project migration. - Use a single email address throughout the process to avoid confusion. - Keep a note of both the old account's email and the domain of the OTTO project before reaching out to support. - Do not create a duplicate OTTO project for the same domain in your new account before the migration is confirmed — this can cause conflicts. 🛠️ Need Help? 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.

⚠️ OTTO and Paginated Archive Pages Limitation

🔍 Overview When you deploy OTTO across your WordPress site, you may notice that canonical tags are not applied to paginated archive pages such as /blog/2/, /blog/3/, or similar numbered URL paths. This is intentional behavior, not a deployment failure. This article explains why OTTO skips these pages and what your options are. 📄 What Are Paginated Archive Pages? Paginated archive pages are automatically generated by WordPress when your blog or post archive spans multiple pages. They follow a pattern like: - /blog/ — the root archive page (page 1) - /blog/2/ — page 2 of the archive - /blog/3/ — page 3 of the archive These pages are distinct from individual posts, category pages, or static pages, and they are handled differently by OTTO during deployment. ⚙️ Why OTTO Skips These Pages OTTO intentionally excludes paginated archive pages from canonical tag deployment to prevent a known conflict with Divi's pagination JavaScript. Here is what happens when OTTO attempts to inject canonical tags on these pages: 1. OTTO inserts its canonical tag module into the page's module sequence in the WordPress head. 2. This insertion shifts the numbering of existing modules on the page. 3. Divi's pagination JavaScript relies on fixed module numbers to function correctly. 4. The numbering shift causes Divi's pagination to break, resulting in non-functional page navigation for site visitors. To protect your site's user experience and prevent pagination from breaking, OTTO skips canonical tag injection on all paginated archive pages. This limitation is tracked internally as WP-315. ✅ What OTTO Does Cover OTTO successfully deploys canonical tags on all other supported page types, including: - Individual blog posts and pages - The root archive page (/blog/ or equivalent) - Category and tag archive pages (non-paginated) - Product pages and other custom post types - Homepage and static landing pages 🛠️ How to Manage Canonicals on Paginated Archive Pages Because OTTO does not write canonical tags to paginated archive pages, you have two recommended options for handling these URLs: - Use your SEO plugin directly: If you are running Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or another SEO plugin, you can configure canonical tag behavior for paginated archives from within that plugin's settings. Most plugins handle paginated archive canonicals automatically by default. - Leave the default browser canonical: WordPress and most themes output a default canonical tag for paginated archive pages that points back to the correct URL. If you have not customized these pages, the default behavior is typically acceptable for SEO purposes. You do not need to take any action to fix a deployment error. OTTO has not failed on these pages — it has skipped them on purpose. 🔎 How to Confirm This Is the Expected Behavior To verify that OTTO's skipping behavior is the cause and not an unrelated issue, follow these steps: 1. Go to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar of your Search Atlas dashboard. 2. Open your connected site and navigate to the OTTO deployment report for your site. 3. Search for the paginated archive URL (for example, /blog/2/). 4. If the URL appears with a skipped or not applicable status rather than a failure status, OTTO has correctly identified and excluded it per this limitation. If the URL shows an unexpected error status unrelated to skipping, that may indicate a separate issue worth investigating. ❓ Frequently Asked Questions Will this limitation affect my SEO? In most cases, no. Paginated archive pages carry relatively low individual SEO value. Search engines generally handle paginated archives well when standard WordPress or plugin-generated canonical tags are in place. Does this apply to all themes, or only Divi? The confirmed conflict is specific to Divi and its pagination JavaScript. However, OTTO applies this skip rule to all paginated archive pages as a precautionary measure to avoid similar conflicts with other themes that use module-dependent JavaScript. Will OTTO ever support paginated archive pages? This is a known limitation tracked under WP-315. Our engineering team is aware of it and is evaluating solutions. We will update this article when support is added. 💬 Need More Help? 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.

🔧 OTTO UI Bug Fixes and Dropdown Improvements

A targeted bug fix update improves the reliability and visual accuracy of key OTTO interface elements, ensuring smoother interactions across deploy actions, Brand Vault dropdowns, and pagination controls. ✨ What's New This release addresses three UI issues that were affecting the OTTO experience: - Deploy/Undeploy Spinner: The loading spinner that appears when deploying or undeploying OTTO actions was not displaying or behaving correctly. This has been resolved so the spinner accurately reflects the operation in progress. - Brand Vault Dropdown Clipping: The Brand Vault dropdown was being visually clipped, cutting off options and making selection difficult. It now renders fully and correctly within the interface. - Pagination Dropdown Width: The pagination dropdown was rendering at an incorrect width, causing layout inconsistencies. It now displays at the proper size for a cleaner, more consistent look. 🛠️ How to Use It 1. Navigate to OTTO SEO in your Search Atlas dashboard. 2. Attempt a deploy or undeploy action and confirm the spinner appears and completes as expected. 3. Open the Brand Vault dropdown and verify all options are fully visible without clipping. 4. Use the pagination controls and confirm the dropdown renders at the correct width. 📋 What to Expect These are visual and interaction bug fixes with no changes to underlying functionality. No configuration or workflow changes are required on your end. All improvements take effect automatically upon your next session. 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.

⚡ Fix OTTO Script Slowdown on Duda Sites

🔍 Why This Happens If your Duda site feels sluggish after installing the OTTO SEO script, the most common cause is an inactive Agency Whitelabel. When whitelabel setup is skipped or left incomplete, the OTTO script makes extra background requests that can significantly delay page rendering — even after you clear your site cache. This issue has been reported on Duda sites in particular, but the underlying fix applies regardless of your CMS. ⚙️ Check Your Whitelabel Status Before making changes, confirm whether your Agency Whitelabel is active. 1. Log in to your Search Atlas account. 2. Navigate to More Features → Agency Hub (Set up your Agency's White Label). 3. Review your whitelabel configuration to see if it has been completed. If fields such as your brand name, logo, or custom domain are blank or marked as inactive, your whitelabel is not fully configured — and this is likely causing the performance drag. 🚀 Activate Your Whitelabel Settings Completing your whitelabel setup allows the OTTO script to load efficiently without unnecessary background calls. 1. Go to More Features → Agency Hub (Set up your Agency's White Label). 2. Enter your brand name and upload your logo. 3. Review the remaining whitelabel configuration options. 4. Activate whitelabel if it is not already enabled. 5. Save your changes. Once whitelabel is active, the OTTO script stops making the redundant requests that slow down your pages. 🧹 Clear Your Duda Site Cache After activating whitelabel, clear all caching layers so visitors receive the optimized version of your site. 1. Log in to your Duda dashboard. 2. Open the affected site. 3. Navigate to Settings → Site Optimization → Clear Cache. 4. Publish your site to push the updated version live. If you use a CDN or external caching service, purge those caches as well. 📊 Verify the Improvement Once you have completed the steps above, confirm that your load times have improved. - Open your live site in an incognito or private browser window. - Test multiple pages, including the homepage and any pages where OTTO is deployed. - Use a speed testing tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. In most cases, page load times return to normal immediately after whitelabel activation and a full cache clear. 💡 Additional Tips If slowdowns persist after completing whitelabel setup, consider these additional steps: - Confirm you are using the latest version of the OTTO installation script. - Check that no other third-party scripts are conflicting with OTTO. - Review your OTTO SEO dashboard to ensure everything is configured correctly. 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO AI Not Following Custom Prompt Instructions

🔍 Overview When using OTTO AI to generate content, you can provide custom prompt instructions to control tone, style, and specific rules — such as avoiding your company name or keeping output within a certain length. If OTTO appears to ignore these instructions, a few common causes are usually responsible. This article explains what to check and how to fix it. ⚠️ Common Symptoms - The AI includes your company name even after you instructed it not to. - Generated content is cut off or truncated unexpectedly. - Output does not reflect the tone, format, or restrictions you specified. - Instructions seem to apply inconsistently across different generations. 💡 Why This Happens OTTO AI processes your custom instructions alongside its built-in SEO logic. In some cases, conflicts between these two sets of rules can cause certain instructions to be deprioritised or missed entirely. The most frequent causes are: - Instruction placement: Instructions buried in long paragraphs are harder for the model to parse reliably. - Conflicting directives: Asking the AI to both maximise content length and avoid repeating certain words can create tension that leads to unpredictable output. - Vague phrasing: Ambiguous instructions such as "keep it short" leave room for interpretation. Specific word or character limits work better. - Token limits: Very long custom prompts combined with large content requests can push the total input near its processing limit, causing instructions near the end to be dropped or content to be cut off. ✅ How to Write Effective Custom Prompts Follow these best practices to ensure OTTO AI respects your instructions every time. 1. Put critical rules first. Place your most important instructions at the very beginning of the custom prompt field, before any stylistic guidance. 2. Be explicit and specific. Instead of "don't mention the company name," write: "Do not use the word [Company Name] anywhere in the output." 3. Set a clear length target. Specify an exact word count range, for example: "Write between 400 and 500 words." Avoid open-ended instructions like "keep it brief." 4. Use a list format for rules. Numbered or bulleted rules inside your prompt are easier for the model to follow than rules written as flowing prose. 5. Avoid contradictory instructions. Review your prompt for conflicting requirements before generating. For example, do not ask for comprehensive detail and a strict 200-word limit at the same time. 6. Keep the prompt concise. Aim for under 200 words in your custom instructions. Longer prompts increase the risk of critical rules being deprioritised. 🚀 Step-by-Step: Updating Your Custom Prompt in OTTO AI 1. Go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → SEO Automation (URL: /seo-automation-v3). 2. Open the OTTO AI generation settings for the relevant page or task. 3. Locate the Custom Instructions or Custom Prompt field. 4. Clear the existing instructions and rewrite them using the best practices above. 5. Place your exclusion rules (e.g., "Do not use [Company Name]") on the first line. 6. Add a specific word count target on the second line. 7. Save your settings and run the generation again. 8. Review the output to confirm your instructions are being followed before applying it to additional pages. 📊 Additional Tips for Consistent Results - Test with a single page first. Validate that your revised prompt works correctly before applying it in bulk. - Use the AI Content Templates tool for recurring content types. Navigate to Left sidebar → Content → AI Content Templates to save standardised prompts so you do not need to re-enter rules each time. - Check output length settings. If content is being cut off, verify that no conflicting length cap is set inside the generation options panel, separate from your custom prompt. - Regenerate if needed. If a single generation still does not comply, regenerate once more. Occasional variation is normal; persistent non-compliance points to a prompt issue. 🙋 Still Need Help? If you have followed all the steps above and OTTO AI is still not following your custom instructions, 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.

🚫 Fix Nginx 444 Errors in OTTO Projects

🔍 What Is the Nginx 444 Error? When you try to add a site to an OTTO project and see a "No sites found" error, the root cause may be your web server silently dropping the connection before Search Atlas can crawl the site. A 444 status code is specific to Nginx — it instructs the server to close the connection immediately without sending any response. Unlike a standard 403 or 429 error, a 444 response produces no error message, making it harder to diagnose. This is not a problem with your OTTO configuration. It means the Nginx server hosting your site is actively blocking the Search Atlas crawler before the crawl can begin. ⚙️ Why Nginx Returns a 444 to Search Atlas Nginx servers can be configured to return a 444 for requests that match certain conditions, including: - Requests from unrecognised or unlisted user-agent strings - Requests from IP address ranges not explicitly permitted in the server configuration - Security rules that treat automated crawlers as malicious traffic by default - Rate-limiting or bot-mitigation rules that trigger on crawl patterns Because the connection is dropped silently, the Search Atlas platform receives no usable response and cannot confirm the site exists — which is why OTTO reports "No sites found" instead of a clear access-denied message. ✅ How to Whitelist the Search Atlas Crawler To allow the Search Atlas crawler through your Nginx server, you need to permit its user-agent and/or IP ranges in your Nginx configuration. Follow the steps below or share them with your hosting provider or developer. 1. Identify your Nginx configuration file. This is typically located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or inside /etc/nginx/sites-available/ for your specific domain. 2. Whitelist the Search Atlas user-agent. Add a rule that allows requests from the Search Atlas crawler user-agent. Your developer should add a condition that checks for the Search Atlas bot user-agent string and ensures it is not matched by any return 444 or deny directive. Contact support via the chat widget below to obtain the exact current user-agent string for the Search Atlas crawler. 3. Whitelist Search Atlas IP ranges. Add the Search Atlas crawler IP addresses to your allowlist before any deny-all or connection-drop rules. Contact support via the chat widget below to obtain the current list of Search Atlas crawler IP addresses. 4. Check the order of your Nginx rules. Nginx processes rules sequentially. Ensure your whitelist rules appear before any blanket bot-blocking or rate-limiting rules, otherwise the allow rule will never be reached. 5. Reload Nginx to apply changes. Run sudo nginx -t to validate the configuration syntax, then run sudo systemctl reload nginx to apply the changes without downtime. 6. Re-add your site in OTTO. Navigate to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar and open All Sites (SEO Automation), open your OTTO project, and attempt to add the site again. The crawler should now be able to reach the site and the "No sites found" error should be resolved. 🛡️ If You Use a Third-Party Firewall or CDN Alongside Nginx If your Nginx server sits behind an additional layer such as a CDN or a web application firewall, the 444 block may be applied at the Nginx level even if your CDN settings appear to allow crawlers. Check both layers: - Nginx configuration — review all return 444 and deny directives, particularly inside if blocks that evaluate the user-agent or remote address. - WAF or CDN rules — confirm that bot-fight or challenge modes are not re-blocking the crawler after Nginx has been updated. Refer to your CDN provider's documentation for steps to whitelist specific user-agents or IP ranges at the CDN level. Both layers must permit the Search Atlas crawler for the connection to succeed. 🔎 How to Confirm the Block Is Resolved After updating your configuration, you can verify the fix before re-adding the site in OTTO: - Use a tool such as curl -A "[Search Atlas user-agent]" https://yourdomain.com from a terminal to simulate a crawler request and confirm the server returns a 200 response instead of dropping the connection. - Check your Nginx access logs (/var/log/nginx/access.log) to confirm requests from the Search Atlas user-agent are no longer returning 444. - Once confirmed, navigate to OTTO SEO in the left sidebar and open All Sites (SEO Automation), then retry adding the site to your OTTO project. 💬 Need Help? 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO Script Verification and Manage Your Account

🔍 Overview If OTTO is not verifying your installed script, it can be frustrating — especially if you are considering cancelling your membership as a result. This article walks you through the most common reasons script verification fails, how to fix them, and what to do if you still want to cancel your account. ⚙️ How OTTO Script Verification Works When you activate OTTO SEO on a website, Search Atlas deploys a small script to your site. OTTO's AI then checks for that script to confirm the connection is live. If the script cannot be detected, OTTO will show a verification error and automation will not run. Verification can fail for several common reasons: - The script was not saved or published correctly on your website - A caching plugin or CDN is serving an older version of your page - A security plugin or firewall is blocking external script detection - The script was placed in the wrong location in your site's HTML - Your website requires HTTPS but the script was added to an HTTP page 🛠️ Steps to Fix the Verification Issue 1. Locate your OTTO script: Go to the left sidebar and select OTTO SEO, then open All Sites (SEO Automation) (URL: /seo-automation-v3). Find your website and open its OTTO settings to copy the script snippet. 2. Confirm the script is published: Log in to your website's CMS or code editor and verify the script appears in the section of every page. Make sure the changes are saved and published — not just saved as a draft. 3. Clear your cache: If you use a caching plugin (such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache), purge all cached files. Also clear any CDN cache (such as Cloudflare) if applicable. 4. Check for script blockers: Temporarily disable security or firewall plugins and re-run the verification. If it passes, whitelist the Search Atlas script domain in your security settings before re-enabling the plugin. 5. Re-run verification: Return to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) (/seo-automation-v3), select your site, and click Verify Script again. Allow up to two minutes for the check to complete. 6. Test with a fresh browser tab: Open your website in a private or incognito window to confirm the script appears on the live page, then retry verification. 💡 Still Not Verifying? Before You Cancel Script issues are almost always resolvable with the right configuration. Our support team can remotely review your script placement and verification logs, saving you the trouble of cancelling and potentially losing your SEO progress. We strongly recommend reaching out before taking any cancellation steps. 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. 🚪 How to Cancel Your Membership If you have decided to proceed with cancellation, please be aware of the following before you act: - Cancelling your account will immediately deactivate OTTO on all connected websites - Your SEO automation history and configurations will no longer be accessible - Subscription fees are non-refundable once a billing cycle has started (refer to your plan's terms) To request a cancellation, 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. A team member will process your request and confirm the cancellation in writing. ❓ Frequently Asked Questions - Can I cancel immediately mid-billing cycle? Yes, but access continues until the end of your current billing period. Our team will confirm the exact end date when you submit your request. - Will cancelling delete my data? Your account data and projects stay on your account after cancellation and are available again if you resubscribe. Deleting your account is a separate, permanent action. - Can I reactivate after cancelling? Yes, you can resubscribe at any time, though your previous OTTO configurations may need to be reconfigured.

🔌 Fix Multiple Websites Disconnected from OTTO SEO

🔍 Overview If multiple websites have suddenly disconnected or disengaged from OTTO SEO, you are not alone. This can happen for several reasons, including authentication changes, subscription limits, or platform sync issues. This article explains the most common causes and walks you through how to reconnect your sites. ⚠️ Common Reasons for Mass Disconnection - Subscription or plan change: If your plan was downgraded, renewed, or modified, the number of OTTO-activated sites allowed may have changed, causing some sites to disengage automatically. - Google Search Console re-authentication: OTTO SEO relies on a live connection to Google Search Console. If your Google account credentials expired or permissions were revoked, all connected sites under that account may disconnect at once. - Workspace ownership or user changes: Removing or changing the account owner, or revoking a team member's access, can break the link between OTTO and the sites they originally connected. - Platform sync timeout: Occasional platform-side sync issues can temporarily disengage sites. This is rare but can affect multiple properties at the same time. 🛠️ How to Reconnect Your Websites to OTTO SEO 1. Navigate to OTTO SEO V3: In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then open SEO Automation to access the OTTO SEO dashboard at /seo-automation-v3. 2. Review your site list: You will see all sites associated with your workspace. Sites that are disconnected will show a disengaged or inactive status indicator next to their name. 3. Check your Google Search Console connection: At the top of the OTTO dashboard, verify that your Google Search Console account is still authenticated. If you see a prompt to reconnect, click it and follow the on-screen steps to re-authorize access. This single action can restore the connection for all sites linked under that Google account. 4. Re-activate each affected site: For sites that remain disengaged after re-authenticating, click the site name to open its OTTO profile, then click Activate OTTO to re-enable automation. 5. Verify site metrics are loading: After reconnecting, go to Left sidebar → Site Metrics (Site Explorer) to confirm that data is flowing correctly for each reconnected domain. 📊 How to Confirm All Sites Are Active Once you have completed the reconnection steps, return to the OTTO SEO V3 dashboard and confirm that each of your websites shows an active OTTO status. You can also check individual domain performance by navigating to Left sidebar → Keywords → Rank Tracker to verify that rankings and data are being tracked as expected. 💡 How to Prevent Future Disconnections - Keep Google Search Console permissions up to date: Ensure the Google account connected to Search Atlas retains owner-level access to all your Search Console properties. - Review your plan limits regularly: Check how many OTTO activations your current plan allows and ensure your active site count stays within that limit. - Avoid removing the primary workspace owner: If you need to change team roles, add the new owner before removing the existing one to maintain uninterrupted connections. - Monitor site status after any account change: Any time you update billing, team members, or Google permissions, log into the OTTO SEO V3 dashboard to confirm all sites remain active. 🆘 Still Seeing Disconnected Sites? If you have followed all the steps above and one or more sites are still showing as disengaged, or if a large number of sites disconnected simultaneously without an obvious cause, our team can investigate the issue directly. 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO v3 Company Location Reverting to Default

🔍 Why Does This Happen? OTTO v3 uses a Domain Knowledge Network (DKN) to personalise AI-generated SEO content for your business. If your company location settings appear to revert to UK defaults, it usually means the DKN company details were never fully saved, were saved under the wrong domain, or were cleared during a domain reset. Every time OTTO generates content, it pulls from these stored details — so an incomplete or missing profile will cause it to fall back on default values. 📍 Where to Find Company Location Settings Follow these steps to locate and update your company details inside OTTO v3: 1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then open SEO Automation (URL: /seo-automation-v3). 2. Select the correct domain from the domain switcher at the top of the page. Make sure you are editing the intended domain before making any changes. 3. Navigate to the Domain Knowledge Network section within the OTTO v3 dashboard. 4. Open the Company Details or Business Information panel. 5. Locate the Location fields, including country, region, city, and address. 6. Update all fields to reflect your correct business location. 7. Click Save to confirm your changes before leaving the page. ✅ How to Confirm Your Settings Are Saved After saving, take these steps to verify that your location details are persisting correctly: - Refresh the page and reopen the Domain Knowledge Network panel to confirm the new values are displayed. - Check that the correct domain is selected in the domain switcher — settings are stored per domain, so switching domains will show different profiles. - Run a short OTTO content generation task and review the output to confirm it reflects your correct location, not UK defaults. ⚠️ Common Reasons Settings Keep Reverting If your location continues to reset after saving, check for these common causes: - Wrong domain selected: OTTO v3 stores DKN profiles per domain. If you have multiple domains, ensure you are editing and saving under the correct one. - Incomplete save: Navigating away before clicking Save will discard your changes. Always confirm the save action before leaving the panel. - Domain reset or reconnection: Reconnecting or resetting a domain can clear previously saved DKN data. After any domain reset, re-enter your company details. - Multiple users overwriting settings: If your account has multiple users, another team member may be resetting the profile. Coordinate with your team to avoid conflicting edits. 💡 Best Practices to Prevent This Issue - Complete all Company Details fields in the DKN as soon as you connect a new domain — do not leave any fields blank. - After any domain-level change (reset, reconnect, or plan change), immediately revisit the DKN and re-confirm your company location. - Designate one team member as responsible for maintaining DKN settings to avoid accidental overwrites. - Periodically spot-check your DKN profile, especially if you notice OTTO-generated content referencing unexpected locations or generic business descriptions. 🆘 Still Need Help? If you have followed all the steps above and your location settings continue to revert, or if you cannot locate the DKN company details panel, our team is ready to help. 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.

🛠️ Fix OTTO Recognizing Deleted Articles

🔍 Why Does This Happen? When you delete an article from your website, OTTO does not automatically know the page is gone. OTTO builds its understanding of your site based on a crawl snapshot taken at a specific point in time. If that snapshot was captured before you deleted the article, OTTO will continue to reference the old URL until the site is re-crawled and the data is refreshed. This is a common occurrence after bulk content clean-ups, CMS migrations, or when pruning thin or outdated pages from your site. 🚀 How to Fix It Follow these steps to clear the stale article data and bring OTTO up to date with your current site structure. 1. Navigate to SEO Automation. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then open SEO Automation inside it. The URL will end in /seo-automation-v3. 2. Locate the OTTO session for your site. Find the domain that is showing the deleted articles and open its OTTO session. 3. Re-crawl your site. Look for the Re-Crawl or Refresh Site Data option within the session settings. Triggering a fresh crawl tells OTTO to re-index your live pages and discard any URLs that no longer return a valid response. 4. Wait for the crawl to complete. Crawl time varies depending on the size of your site. Once finished, OTTO will update its page list automatically. 5. Review the updated page list. After the crawl completes, return to the OTTO session and confirm the deleted articles no longer appear. Any URL that returns a 404 Not Found or a redirect will be removed from OTTO's active recommendations. 6. Dismiss or ignore residual suggestions (if needed). If any stale suggestions remain after the re-crawl, use the Dismiss option next to the affected recommendation to manually remove it from your queue. 💡 Tips to Prevent This in the Future - Re-crawl after major content changes. Whenever you delete, redirect, or restructure a significant number of pages, trigger a fresh crawl in OTTO right away to keep its data accurate. - Set up proper 301 redirects. When deleting articles, redirect the old URLs to relevant live pages. This is good SEO practice and also helps OTTO correctly map your site's current structure. - Audit your content before activating OTTO. Running a crawl before you start a new OTTO session ensures recommendations are based on your most current content inventory. ⚙️ What OTTO Does With Deleted URLs Once a re-crawl is complete, OTTO automatically filters out any URL that is no longer live. Specifically: - Pages returning a 404 error are removed from the active page list. - Pages returning a 301 or 302 redirect are updated to reflect the destination URL. - Pages that have been noindexed after deletion may still appear but will be flagged accordingly. OTTO will not generate new SEO recommendations for URLs that are confirmed as non-existent after the crawl. 🆘 Still Seeing Deleted Articles? If deleted articles continue to appear even after a successful re-crawl, there may be an underlying issue with how your CMS is serving those URLs or a cached version that is still returning a 200 status code. Check your CMS and hosting cache settings to confirm the pages are fully removed at the server level. 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.

🔍 Why OTTO Isn't Showing Your On-Page Fixes

🧭 Overview After deploying on-page fixes through OTTO, you may notice that the changes don't appear immediately inside the platform — or that OTTO still shows outdated content such as old meta descriptions, blog posts, or a previous site icon. This is almost always caused by a crawl delay, not a deployment failure. This article explains why this happens and what you can do to speed up the process. ⚙️ Why Does This Happen? OTTO relies on its site crawler to read your live website and update the data it displays inside the platform. When you deploy a fix, the change goes live on your site right away — but OTTO's display won't update until the crawler revisits your pages and pulls in the new data. Several factors can slow this down: - Large websites: Sites with many pages take longer to fully re-crawl. - Crawl queue: During high-demand periods, your site may be queued behind other crawl requests. - Server response time: If your hosting server responds slowly, the crawler takes longer to process each page. - Caching layers: CDN or server-side caches may serve the old version of your page to the crawler even after you've updated your site. This is a known platform behaviour. Your fixes are live on your website — OTTO's dashboard simply needs time to catch up and reflect them. ✅ How to Confirm Your Fixes Are Already Live Before taking any action inside OTTO, verify that your changes are actually live on the front end: 1. Open your browser and navigate to the affected page. 2. Right-click the page and select View Page Source. 3. Search for the specific element you changed (e.g., meta title, meta description, alt tag, or H1). 4. If your updated content appears in the source code, the fix is live — OTTO just hasn't re-crawled it yet. You can also open the page in a private/incognito window to bypass your local browser cache and confirm the live version. 🛠️ Steps to Refresh OTTO's Data Follow these steps to prompt OTTO to re-crawl your site and update its displayed data: 1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) to open the OTTO dashboard. 2. Locate your connected website and open its OTTO session. 3. Look for the Re-crawl or Refresh Site option within the session controls and click it. 4. Allow the crawl to complete — this can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on your site size. 5. Once the crawl finishes, return to the OTTO dashboard and check whether your fixes are now reflected. If you have a caching plugin (such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache) or a CDN (such as Cloudflare), clear your cache before triggering the re-crawl. This ensures the crawler sees the most up-to-date version of your pages. ⏱️ How Long Should I Wait? Crawl times vary based on site size and server performance. As a general guide: - Small sites (under 50 pages): Typically update within 15–60 minutes. - Medium sites (50–500 pages): May take 1–4 hours. - Large sites (500+ pages): Can take several hours or longer. If more than 24 hours have passed since you triggered a re-crawl and your fixes still aren't showing inside OTTO, proceed to the next section. 🚩 When to Contact Support Reach out to our team if any of the following apply: - Your fixes are confirmed live in your page source but OTTO hasn't updated after 24+ hours. - The re-crawl appears to be stuck or never completes. - Specific elements such as your site icon, blog posts, or structured data are consistently not being picked up despite multiple re-crawl attempts. - Your OTTO session shows fixes as Deployed but the frontend of your site does not reflect them at all. 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. Additional Notes Test page speed via Google PageSpeed Insights: score below 50 or TTFB above 600ms indicates crawl impact. Check server response with GTmetrix/Pingdom — above 1–2 seconds can cause crawler timeouts on content-heavy pages.

🔍 Find SEO Issues and Affected Pages in OTTO

🗺️ Overview OTTO SEO includes a built-in Site Audit tool that scans your website and surfaces SEO issues grouped by type. This article walks you through how to navigate to the audit, locate affected pages, and understand the information available so you can start fixing issues quickly. 🚀 Step 1: Open OTTO SEO 1. Log in to your Search Atlas account. 2. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then SEO Automation. This takes you to the main OTTO SEO dashboard (All Sites) at /seo-automation-v3. 3. You will see a list of your connected sites under the All Sites view. Active and Deep Frozen sites are shown here. 🌐 Step 2: Select Your Website 1. From the All Sites list, click the website you want to audit. 2. This opens the Overview page for that site, where you can see a high-level summary of your site's SEO health. 3. If you have not yet run a scan, click the Scan button at the top of the Overview page to trigger a fresh crawl of your site. 📋 Step 3: Navigate to All Audits 1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then Site Audit, then select All Audits. 2. This page lists every audit that has been run for your connected sites, along with the scan date and a summary of issues found. 3. Click on a specific audit to open the full audit report for that scan. 🔎 Step 4: Browse Issues and Find Affected Pages Inside the audit report, issues are organised by category — for example, missing meta titles, broken links, slow page speed, and more. Here is how to drill down to the affected pages: 1. Scroll through the Issues section to see all detected SEO problems, each showing a count of how many pages are affected. 2. Click on any issue to expand it and reveal the list of specific pages that have that problem. 3. Use the View Pages option within an issue to see the full list of affected URLs, along with relevant details such as the current value and the recommended fix. 4. You can sort or filter the list to prioritise the pages that will have the greatest impact on your SEO performance. 📊 Step 5: Use Crawl Monitoring for Ongoing Tracking In addition to on-demand audits, OTTO SEO includes Crawl Monitoring for continuous tracking of your site's health. - Go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Crawl Monitoring to view live crawl data and track newly discovered issues over time. - This is especially useful for large sites where new pages are published frequently or where issues may appear after a site update. 💡 Tips for Getting the Most from Site Audit - Run a fresh scan after making changes to your site so the audit reflects your latest content. - Start with high-impact issues — issues affecting the most pages or flagged as critical will typically deliver the biggest SEO gains when fixed. - Check the Knowledge Base inside OTTO SEO (Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Knowledge Base) for guidance on how to resolve specific issue types. - Use the Overview page as your starting point each session — it gives a quick summary of your site's overall health score and highlights areas needing attention. 🛠️ Troubleshooting - Audit not loading or showing an error: Refresh the page and try again. If the issue persists, run a new scan from the Overview page. - Page count looks incorrect: This can happen immediately after a new scan finishes. Wait a moment and refresh the audit report to see updated counts. - No issues showing: Confirm that OTTO SEO is properly installed on your site by visiting Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → Installation Guide. 💬 Need More Help? 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.

🛠️ OTTO Authority Building 403 Error

🔍 What the 403 error means A 403 Forbidden error means the Authority Building 30-Day Growth Plan page rejected the request. This can happen when OTTO uses an outdated page link, your session has expired, or the feature is not correctly enabled for the workspace. Workspace owners and administrators should normally be able to access the plan. 🧭 Open Authority Building from the current menu 1. Sign in to Search Atlas and confirm that you are using the correct workspace. 2. Open Authority from the left sidebar. 3. Open an available Authority section, such as PR Distribution, Cloud Stacks, Indexer, QUEST AI Visibility, Campaigns, or Inbox. 4. Return to OTTO and try opening the Authority Building 30-Day Growth Plan again. 🔄 Try these quick fixes - Refresh the page and sign in again. - Open Search Atlas in a private or incognito browser window. - Clear the browser cache and cookies for Search Atlas. - Disable browser extensions that block scripts or redirect links. - Try a current version of Chrome, Edge, or another supported browser. - Make sure your subscription and workspace are active. 👥 Check your workspace access Open the top-right avatar menu and select Team Members. Confirm that your account is listed as an active Admin or Member in the correct workspace. If you belong to multiple workspaces, switch to the workspace where OTTO and the plan were set up. 🧾 What to include when reporting the issue If the error continues, note the exact steps that produce it, the workspace name, your account role, the browser you used, and the approximate time of the attempt. A screenshot of the 403 page can also help the team identify an outdated link or workspace provisioning issue. 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.

🛠️ OTTO SEO Disengaged Mode: Fix Unresponsive Interface

What Is OTTO SEO Disengaged Mode? Search Atlas includes an OTTO SEO feature that assists with on-page optimisations in the content editor. When OTTO SEO is disengaged, some users have reported that parts of the interface become unresponsive — buttons appear visible but cannot be clicked, and actions do not register. Common Symptoms - Clicking buttons in the editor produces no response after disengaging OTTO SEO. - Suggested changes are visible but cannot be accepted or dismissed. - The editor area appears interactive but does not respond to input. Steps to Try Before Contacting Support If your interface becomes unresponsive after disengaging OTTO SEO, work through the following steps in order: 1. Hard refresh the page. Press Ctrl + Shift + R (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + Shift + R (Mac) to force a full reload, bypassing any cached page state. 2. Clear your browser cache and cookies for the Search Atlas domain, then reload the editor. 3. Re-engage OTTO SEO, then disengage it again. Toggling the OTTO SEO setting off and back on (then off again) can reset the interface state and restore click responsiveness. 4. Try a different browser or an incognito/private window. This rules out browser extensions or local cache as the cause. 5. Reopen the project. Close the current editor tab, navigate back to your project list, and reopen the affected content item from scratch. If none of the above steps restore responsiveness, escalate to our support team. When you reach out, please have the following ready so our team can investigate efficiently: - The name of the project or content item where the issue occurred. - Whether OTTO SEO was manually disengaged or changed state automatically. - The browser and operating system you are using. - A description of exactly which part of the interface stopped responding. - Any steps you already tried (e.g. refreshing, reopening the editor). 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.

🔧 Troubleshooting OTTO Connection Failures and Service ID Errors

Overview When OTTO fails to connect to a project, you may see a missing or blank service ID, OTTO Score errors across all sites, and OTTO SEO Strategy features that are unavailable. These symptoms commonly trace back to a pixel installation problem, a script conflict, or a caching issue. Follow the steps below in order to diagnose and resolve the connection failure. Step 1: Confirm Your Service ID Exists A service ID is generated when OTTO is successfully linked to a project. If no service ID appears, the connection did not complete. 1. Navigate to the OTTO SEO section of the platform and select the affected project. 2. Look for your service ID in your OTTO or OTTO SEO settings area. If the field is blank or shows an error, do not proceed with pixel installation until the connection has been refreshed. 3. Try disconnecting and reconnecting OTTO to the project, then check whether a service ID is generated. 4. Copy the service ID once it appears and keep it ready for the steps below. Step 2: Verify Pixel Installation on Your Site The OTTO pixel must be present on every page of your site for the service ID to register correctly. Choose the installation method that matches your setup. WordPress Plugin Method 1. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard. 2. Install and activate the OTTO pixel plugin associated with your Search Atlas account. 3. Open the plugin settings and paste your service ID into the designated field. 4. Save changes and confirm the pixel snippet appears in your site's <head> section by viewing the page source and searching for your service ID. Manual Script / Custom Code Method 1. From your OTTO settings, copy the full pixel script snippet. 2. Paste the snippet inside the <head> tag of your site's HTML template or theme header file so it loads on every page. 3. If you use a page builder, place the script in the builder's global custom code or header scripts section rather than on individual pages. 4. Save and publish your changes, then verify the snippet is present in the page source. Google Tag Manager Method 1. Open your GTM container and create a new custom HTML tag. 2. Paste the OTTO pixel script into the tag body. 3. Set the trigger to fire on all pages. 4. Submit and publish the container version. 5. Use GTM's preview/debug mode to confirm the tag fires on page load before moving to the next step. Step 3: Clear Cache and Test Caching can prevent an updated pixel from being detected. After installing or updating the pixel: 1. Clear your site's server-side cache, any caching plugin cache (such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache), and your CDN cache if applicable. 2. Open your site in a private/incognito browser window to avoid brow 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.

OTTO Manual Edits Not Saving in OTTO SEO

🔍 Overview Some users have experienced an issue where manually editing OTTO suggested fixes in the OTTO SEO task appears to work — the edit fields open, changes can be typed in — but clicking Save does not retain those changes. Following the steps below has resolved this issue for affected accounts. ✅ What You Should Do If your manual edits to OTTO suggested fixes are not saving, work through these steps in order: 1. Navigate to the OTTO SEO task section in the platform. 2. Locate the OTTO suggested fix you want to edit and open the edit fields. 3. Make your changes and click Save. 4. Refresh the page and reopen the same item to check whether your edits have been retained. 5. If the edits are still not saving after a refresh, disconnect and reconnect OTTO for the affected site: go to your OTTO settings, disconnect OTTO from the site, wait a few seconds, then reconnect it. This re-establishes the sync between OTTO and the site and has resolved the save issue for affected users. 6. After reconnecting, return to the OTTO SEO task, re-enter your manual edits, click Save, and refresh the page to confirm the changes are now persisting. If your changes are persisting after saving and refreshing, the issue has resolved itself for your account. ⚠️ If You Are Still Experiencing This Issue If disconnecting and reconnecting OTTO does not resolve the problem, gather the following details before reaching out so the investigation can begin quickly: - The specific field or suggested fix you are trying to edit. - Whether any error message appears after clicking Save, or if the page simply reverts your changes silently. - The affected site URL and the OTTO task type. If you need further assistance, please reach out to our support team via the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of the platform, and a member of our team will be happy to help. 📋 Summary Manually edited OTTO suggested fixes in the OTTO SEO task may fail to save for some users. Disconnecting and reconnecting OTTO for the affected site has resolved this issue for affected accounts. If the problem persists after reconnecting, contact our support team with the details listed above so the issue can be investigated promptly.

🔗 Fixing Unreachable OTTO Scripts After Lovable Migration

🔎 What This Article Covers If your SEO automation dashboard shows that all your OTTO scripts are unreachable after moving your whitelabel setup to Lovable, this guide explains why it happens and how to fix it. You will also learn how to migrate without losing your agency profile or disconnecting your OTTO sites. ⚠️ Why OTTO Scripts Become Unreachable OTTO works by connecting each of your sites to a small script that must load from the domain associated with your whitelabel setup. When you migrate your platform to a new host or environment such as Lovable, that connection can break for a few common reasons: - The whitelabel domain changed, so the OTTO script points to an address that no longer serves it. - DNS records were not updated after the migration, so requests to the script fail. - The OTTO script snippet on each site still references the old environment. - Caching or CDN settings from the previous setup are still active. When any of these happen, the dashboard cannot verify the script and marks your sites as unreachable, even though your account and data are intact. 🛡️ Protect Your Agency Profile First Your agency profile and OTTO site connections are stored in your account, not in the migrated front end. Migrating to Lovable does not delete this data. To keep everything safe before you make changes: - Confirm you are logged in to the same account you used before the migration. - Do not create a new account or new agency profile, as this can split your data. - Note your current whitelabel domain and any custom DNS records. 🛠️ How to Reconnect Your OTTO Scripts Follow these steps in order to restore the connection between your sites and OTTO. 1. Confirm your new whitelabel domain. Open your whitelabel settings and verify the domain now points to your Lovable environment. 2. Update your DNS records. Make sure the CNAME or A record for your whitelabel domain resolves to the correct destination. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate. 3. Re-copy the OTTO script. For each affected site, open the OTTO settings and copy the current script snippet. Replace the old snippet on your site with this fresh version. 4. Clear caches. Clear your site cache, browser cache, and any CDN cache so the new script can load. 5. Re-run the connection check. Return to the Left sidebar → OTTO SEO and use the option to verify or re-scan each site. ✅ Confirm Everything Reconnected After completing the steps above, review your dashboard to confirm the results: - Each OTTO site should now show a connected or active status instead of unreachable. - Your agency profile, branding, and client list should appear exactly as before. - Any pending OTTO tasks should resume automatically once the script is reachable. If a site still shows as unreachable, wait for DNS propagation to finish and then re-run the connection check. Most remaining errors clear on their own within a day. 💡 Tips to Avoid This During Future Migrations - Plan the domain move first. Set up and verify your new whitelabel domain before switching environments. - Keep the same account. Never start fresh, as your OTTO connections live in your existing profile. - Update scripts last. Refresh the OTTO snippet on each site only after DNS is confirmed working. - Migrate in batches. If you manage many sites, reconnect a few first to confirm the process before doing the rest. 💬 Still Need Help? If your OTTO scripts remain unreachable after following these steps, our team can review your specific setup. If you need further assistance, click the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of the platform to start a live chat with a member of our team.

🖥️ Front-End vs. Back-End Changes

OTTO deploys front-end fixes — meta titles, descriptions, and heading tags — in preview or live mode. Your CMS, WordPress database, and SEO plugin settings are never modified. 🖥️ Front-End Modifications Front-end changes affect the HTML of your page — including meta titles, meta descriptions, and heading tags. How OTTO delivers these changes depends on your integration: - ⚡ JavaScript injection — used for preview mode and non-WordPress sites. Changes are injected directly in your browser session. - 🔌 SA WordPress plugin — applies changes at the server/plugin level, which can also influence CSS and title rendering. The WordPress admin setting Disable OTTO for Logged in Users prevents OTTO injections from appearing to authenticated visitors. A prior regression (WP-313, now resolved) caused deployed titles to persist for logged-in users regardless of this setting. If you still see deployed titles for logged-in users, update to the latest plugin version. 👁️ Preview Mode In preview mode, OTTO injects changes only into your browser session. Other visitors are not affected, and no permanent modifications are made to your site. Use preview mode to review a fix before deploying it. 🚀 Deployed State Once deployed, a fix goes live and is visible to all visitors. Deployed fixes — such as Heading Length corrections or updated meta titles — remain active until you explicitly remove them. ↩️ How to Undeploy a Front-End Change 1. Go to your OTTO project and open the Deployments tab. 2. Filter or search by issue type (for example, Heading Length or Meta Title) to locate the specific fix. 3. Click Undeploy next to the fix. The change is removed from the live page immediately. ⚠️ Known Issue: WordPress Plugin CSS Override (WP-315, Active) If the SA WordPress plugin is active and your site CSS appears affected site-wide, this is an active regression — the plugin may override CSS beyond its intended scope. Temporary workaround: Disable the SA WordPress plugin until the permanent fix is released. Re-enable it only after Search Atlas support confirms the WP-315 fix appears in the plugin changelog (not yet released as of 2026-05-24). 🔧 Resolved Issues: Cloudflare DNS and Heading Length Cloudflare DNS deployments reverting (OTTO-1931, resolved): Deployed changes previously reverted shortly after application. If you are on Cloudflare DNS and still see deployments reverting, update to the latest OTTO version or contact support. Heading Length with inline HTML (WP-314, resolved): Headings containing inline elements such as <span> or <strong> from Elementor previously produced corrupted output when replaced. If you deployed heading fixes before the WP-314 fix release, review those headings and redeploy if corruption is visible. ⚙️ Back-End Modifications The Content Assistant tool does not write to your CMS (Content Management System). Platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and Wix — and the data stored within them — are never modified by Search Atlas. SEO plugin fields managed by tools like Yoast or Rank Math remain completely untouched. All Search Atlas changes operate within their own layer and do not interact with your CMS database or third-party plugin settings. 🎯 You now know how OTTO previews and deploys front-end changes, how to reverse a deployment, and that your CMS and SEO plugin settings are never modified by Search Atlas. To explore what OTTO can optimize across your site, see the OTTO Optimizations guide.

🛠️ Fixing Custom HTML Content Module Glitches After OTTO Activation

If your site shows broken headings or banner issues after activating OTTO, the cause is malformed HTML inside your Custom HTML Content module deployments — not OTTO itself. Delete the affected deployments and clear your site cache to restore your layout. 🔍 What Causes Custom HTML Content Module Glitches Malformed HTML structure inside the Custom HTML Content module's deployments causes overwritten headings, broken banners, and layout shifts. OTTO does not generate or modify this content — the problem originates from how the HTML was structured before or during deployment. OTTO's global rollback and undo features do not reach inside the Custom HTML Content module, so each deployment must be individually cleared using the steps below. 🛠️ How to Fix Custom HTML Content Module Glitches In Search Atlas, go to OTTO → Miscellaneous → Custom HTML Content, then follow these steps in order: 1. Click the first deployment in the module menu. 2. Delete all text inside that deployment. 3. Click Edit & Deploy to save the now-empty deployment. 4. Repeat steps 1–3 for every remaining deployment in the list. 5. Clear your site cache through your hosting provider or caching plugin. Reload your site after the cache clears. Your headings, banners, and layout should return to normal. Note: If you are on a White Label plan and custom HTML added via Report Builder disappears automatically, this is a separate known issue currently being resolved — contact support. 💡 How to Prevent Custom HTML Content Glitches on Future Projects Apply these two guidelines when onboarding new clients to avoid repeating this issue: - Validate HTML before deploying. Every entry in the Custom HTML Content module must use well-formed, properly nested HTML. Run your code through an HTML validator before clicking Edit & Deploy. - Leave the module empty if you don't need it. If a client's project does not require custom HTML injections, do not add deployments to the Custom HTML Content module. Unused deployments with malformed markup are the most common trigger for these glitches. 🎯 You now know how to clear malformed HTML deployments from the Custom HTML Content module and prevent site glitches from affecting future client projects. For a broader overview of what OTTO deploys and manages on your site, see the OTTO Activation overview article.

Viewing OTTO's Change History on Your Site

What This Article Covers If you need to know what changes OTTO made to a client's site — such as schema deployments or H1 tag updates — this article explains what records are currently available, how to access them, and what to do if you need a full detailed history. Is There a Self-Service Activity Log? At this time, there is no dedicated self-service activity log in the SearchAtlas dashboard that lists every OTTO action with timestamps in one place. The most reliable way to obtain a complete change history is to contact the support team directly, who can retrieve your account's OTTO activity from internal records. How to Request Your OTTO Activity Log 1. Gather any relevant details before reaching out: your site's domain, an approximate date range you want to review, and a description of any specific changes or issues you noticed (for example, a schema deployment, an H1 tag update, or an unexpected site change). 2. Contact the SearchAtlas support team through the chat widget in your dashboard. Provide the domain and date range so the team can look up the relevant records quickly. 3. The support team will pull the activity history from internal records and share the relevant entries with you, which can include details such as which OTTO actions were applied and on what dates. If You Suspect OTTO Changes Caused a Site Issue If you notice problems such as broken navigation menus, missing links, or unexpected layout changes after an OTTO deployment, follow these steps before concluding OTTO is the cause: - Check whether any third-party plugins — for example, multilingual or translation plugins — were recently updated or reconfigured, as these can independently affect site menus and URL structures. - Note the approximate date when the issue appeared and any specific pages affected, then share this information with the support team so they can cross-reference it against your OTTO change records. - Contact the SearchAtlas support team with these details so they can review the activity log and confirm whether any OTTO deployment corresponds to the issue. If you have questions about your OTTO change history that aren't covered here, please reach out to our support team — we're happy to help.