My brand scan failed — what now?
Why brand scans sometimes fail, the common causes, and what to do when retrying doesn't help.
What this is
The "Scan brand now" step reaches out to your website, reads the HTML, and pulls out your logo, brand colors, services list, and tone. About 95% of the time it works in 30 seconds. When it doesn't, the failure usually has a simple cause.
What "failed" looks like
You'll see one of three states:
- "Couldn't scan that website" — we got an error from your site (not reachable, returned 404, etc.).
- "Couldn't reach the website or extract any content" — we got there but found no useful content.
- The scan hangs past 90 seconds. Treat this as a failure and retry.
The common causes (most to least likely)
1. Typo in the URL
We accept youragency.com, https://youragency.com, youragency.com/. We do not accept:
youragency(no.com)www.prefixes paired withhttps://typos (https//www…)- Email addresses pasted by accident
Fix: retype the URL carefully. Open it in a new tab first to make sure it loads.
2. Site behind a "click to verify you're human" wall
Cloudflare, Imperva, and similar services sometimes block our scanner because we look like a bot (we are — a friendly one, but still).
Fix: if your hosting provider is Cloudflare, ask them to whitelist OdobbaBrandBot/1.0 in firewall rules. Or skip the scan and add your brand info manually in Settings → Brand.
3. Site requires login
If your homepage is behind a customer-portal login, our scanner can't reach the public content.
Fix: point the scan at a public marketing page instead — e.g. youragency.com/about instead of the root.
4. Brand-new site with no real content
If your website is a placeholder ("Coming soon" or a blank one-pager), there's nothing to extract.
Fix: wait until you have real content, or skip the scan and use Settings → Brand to set your logo and colors manually.
5. Temporary network hiccup
Rare but happens. Our scanner uses a 15-second timeout per page.
Fix: wait 30 seconds and click Retry. If it's still failing, it's not a hiccup — see causes above.
When everything fails
If you've checked all of the above and still can't scan:
- Skip the scan during onboarding. Your campaigns will use a neutral default style for creatives.
- After onboarding, open Settings → Company and manually set:
- Logo URL — paste a public URL to your logo image (PNG, JPG, or SVG, max 2 MB).
- Primary color — your main brand color in hex (e.g.
#7c3aed). - Secondary color — optional accent color.
- Open Settings → Brand → Brand Intelligence and click Re-scan website — the background scan tries once a day automatically, but you can force it.
That gives the AI enough to create reasonable creatives.
The scan affects ad copy, not just images
A failed scan means we don't have your tone, target audience, or value propositions to feed to the AI. The image still gets your logo, but the headline/body will be more generic. Manually filling in Settings → Company → About will help.
I scanned but the result is wrong
If the scan succeeded but extracted the wrong logo or wrong colors:
- Wrong logo. Some sites have multiple logos in the page header. We pick the most prominent one. Override it in Settings → Company → Logo URL.
- Wrong colors. If your site has a lot of stock photography, we sometimes pick a color from a photo instead of your brand color. Override in Settings → Company → Primary color / Secondary color.
- Wrong services. We extract from your services / "what we do" pages. If they're hidden behind a nav menu or in a slider, we may miss them. Edit Settings → Company → Service categories.
For more on fixing the visual output, see The creative looks wrong.
Common questions
Q: Does scanning cost anything? A: No. Scans are free and unlimited.
Q: How often does the background scan run? A: Once a day if you have a website set. You don't have to trigger it manually after onboarding.
Q: I changed my website. Will the scan pick that up? A: Yes — the next daily scan will. Or trigger one immediately via Settings → Brand → Re-scan website.