🔍 Overview

If your Site Audit project shows a "Crawl has failed" status with zero HTTP buckets after several days, or if OTTO cannot detect your installed pixel, this article explains the most common causes and the steps you can take to resolve them.

⚠️ Common Symptoms

• Site Audit project stuck on "Crawl has failed" with no data after 5 or more days
• OTTO backend returns a 404 error for your project even though the pixel script appears in your page's raw HTML
• OTTO pixel scan starts but never completes, leaving your project without a deployment verdict
• CMS type shown as "Undetected" even for platforms like Shopify, GoHighLevel, or HubSpot
• Manual reprocessing appears stuck with target pages not crawled and no suggestions generated

🧩 Why This Happens

Several distinct issues can cause these symptoms. Understanding which one applies to your situation will help you choose the right fix.

• Redirect interference: If your domain has redirect chains (for example, HTTP to HTTPS, or www to non-www), the crawler may follow loops or dead ends and fail to index any pages, resulting in zero HTTP buckets.
• Pixel scan timeout: A known platform issue can cause pixel scans on certain projects to start and then never finish. This prevents OTTO from confirming whether your script is active and blocks the deployment verdict.
• CMS fingerprinting gaps: OTTO previously had difficulty identifying Shopify, GoHighLevel, and HubSpot sites automatically. A fix for this has been shipped, but older projects created before the fix may still show an undetected CMS.
• GTM-based installations: If you installed the OTTO pixel via Google Tag Manager rather than directly in your HTML, detection can take between 10 and 15 minutes after GTM fires on a live page visit. Checking too soon will show the pixel as undetected even when installation is correct.
• Backend project mismatch: In rare cases, the project UUID stored in Search Atlas becomes out of sync with the backend service, causing 404 responses even when the pixel is genuinely present in your raw HTML.

✅ Step-by-Step Troubleshooting

1. Verify your pixel installation. Open your website in a browser, right-click, and select View Page Source. Search for the OTTO script tag. If you do not see it in the raw HTML, reinstall the pixel by navigating to OTTO SEO in Search Atlas and following the installation instructions for your site.
2. Check for redirect chains. Use a free redirect-checker tool to confirm your domain resolves cleanly to a single final URL without unnecessary hops. If redirect chains exist, fix them at the server or DNS level before re-running the crawl.

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.

If OTTO shows a deployment but the live site has not changed

A crawl failure and a deployment that is not visible on the live page are different issues. For a failed crawl, check OTTO SEO → All Sites → Crawl Monitoring, verify that the pixel is present in the live page source, and check for redirect chains, robots.txt blocks, password protection, or timeouts before starting a fresh scan.

If Search Atlas shows a fix as deployed but the live page does not show it, record the domain, affected URL or suggestion, deployment time, and what the live page currently shows. Check the rendered live page rather than only the CMS value: OTTO can render SEO fixes through its active script without changing the underlying CMS field. Contact support with those details instead of repeatedly deploying the same fix.

What if OTTO says "Your deployed fixes have not been verified yet", "Wrong UUID" or "Engaged - pixel not detected" after a manual script install?

These messages all point to the same thing: OTTO could not confirm that the OTTO pixel for this exact project is running on your site. Deployed fixes cannot be marked as verified until that check passes. The steps below apply when you paste the OTTO script yourself (for example with Elementor Custom Code in the head section) instead of using the plugin.

1. Copy the script from your OTTO project's installation guide and paste it into the head section of your site. The tag includes the id sa-dynamic-optimization, a data-uuid value and a source ending in /scripts/dynamic_optimization.js on your own domain. Keep the anti-minify and anti-optimize attributes in the tag (for example nowprocket, nitro-exclude, data-no-minify="1", data-no-optimize="1", data-noptimize="1").
2. Open your homepage in an incognito window, view the page source and confirm the data-uuid value matches the UUID shown for this project in OTTO.
3. Confirm only one OTTO script tag is present and no old script from a previous OTTO project remains.
4. Save, publish and clear your site and CDN caches, then run the installation diagnostics again.

If the check still fails, support may ask you to delete the OTTO project and add it again, and then to send a short screen recording so the case can be reviewed by a higher support tier. In a reviewed case the status showed as fine afterwards.

If your site is served through Cloudflare, the OTTO installation for that domain may need to be done through Cloudflare again.

What does VERIFICATION_UNAVAILABLE mean in the installation diagnostics?

When the diagnostics show some checks as unknown, such as page reachability, pixel in page source and pixel in the rendered page, with the result VERIFICATION_UNAVAILABLE, OTTO could not complete those checks. This can happen even when you can see deployed OTTO changes on your live page. If it stays this way after a fresh run, contact us through live chat with the project ID, the page URL you scanned and the time of the scan so the team can investigate.