Optimize your route
What Optimize actually does, the two alternatives in the same menu, the daily limit on how often you can run it, and why the button is sometimes greyed out.
Once a route has stops in it, Optimize reorders them into the sequence you should actually drive — respecting your route and stop settings, and honoring live road data when it's on. Each successful run spends one of your day's optimizations, so the button is worth understanding before you lean on it.
What Optimize does
Press Optimize and Routerra reorders every stop on the route for the fastest sequence it can find, given your settings. The route's status changes to Optimized. Re-running it on a route that's already optimized asks first — on the app, a confirmation reads Re-optimize Route?, "This route is already optimized. Are you sure you want to re-optimize it?".
Optimize sits at the top of the route's dropdown menu, above the two alternatives below — and above Split, which does something different again.
Tap the route's split button — it reads Optimize (or Drive once the route already has an order to follow) — to run it directly, or open the Optimize Options sheet for the same alternatives.
The two alternatives
Two of the menu's other items reorder stops without spending a full optimization:
- Calculate as added (the app calls it Calculate as added stop) — keeps the stops in the order you added them, and sets the route's status to As added instead of Optimized. Use it when your own order already makes sense and you just want drive times and ETAs calculated against it.
- Reverse (labelled Reverse route in the app, and on web's confirmation) — flips the current stop order end to end and sets the route's status to Reversed. Confirming it shows the same warning on both clients: "Reversing may result in a non-optimal route." followed by "Set Arrival Time or "Earliest" Priority for last stops and re-optimize."
Split, the fourth item (web only)
Split doesn't reorder anything — it divides the route's existing stops into several new routes. It asks for a maximum number of stops per route, then creates the new routes and leaves them in your routes list; a route can be split into at most 20 of them. The app has no equivalent. See Split a long route into several for the dialog, the limits, and where the new routes end up.
Your daily optimization limit
Every plan has two independent limits, and only one of them is about optimizing:
- Optimizations — how many times you can run Optimize today. Web's Settings shows it as Optimizations left; the app's Profile plan card labels the same meter Optimizations. Both refill on a rolling countdown, shown as Resets in plus a duration like "3h 12m" — not a fixed reset time.
- Stops limit — how many stops a single route can hold on your plan. Web calls it Stops limit; the app's meter is labelled Stops. This is a per-route ceiling, not something that gets used up.
Running out of either doesn't grey out the button. Instead:
- Out of optimizations: pressing Optimize opens the Daily Optimization Limit Reached dialog on web, or an upgrade-plan sheet in the app.
- Over the stops limit: you'll hit the Route Stops Limit Reached dialog when you try to add another stop.
See Plans and limits for what each plan includes.
Why is Optimize greyed out?
If the button itself is disabled — not just blocked behind a dialog — it's one of the reasons below, checked in order.
Web checks four reasons, shown as a tooltip over the disabled button:
- Optimization in progress — an optimize request for this route is already running.
- Route should have stops — the route currently has zero stops.
- Stops quota reached — despite the label, this checks your route's stop count against your plan's per-route stop limit, not your optimizations. It's a different limit from the daily optimization count above.
- Resolve issues before optimization — a stop on the route has an unresolved problem, such as an address that couldn't be geocoded.
The app checks five reasons in order, but only four of them can actually grey the button out:
- Optimization in progress — an optimize request for this route is already running.
- No stops to optimize — the route currently has zero stops.
- Not enough tokens — you're out of today's optimizations. The app checks this here too, but deliberately doesn't disable the button for it — see the callout below.
- Route not optimizable — a stop on the route has an unresolved problem, such as an address that couldn't be geocoded.
- Route optimization failed — the last optimize attempt on this route failed; the button stays disabled until that's resolved.
Two other dropdown items have their own disabled conditions, separate from Optimize: Split greys out above 200 total stops, and Reverse greys out on a freshly created route that hasn't been optimized yet.
Reverse route greys out on a freshly created route that hasn't been optimized yet, the same as on web. Splitting a route isn't available in the app at all.
Refine the path between stops (web only)
Optimizing decides the order of your stops. Refine is about the path between them — the actual roads. Use it when the route is technically fine but takes a road you know to avoid: a gate that's usually shut, a turn that's impossible in a long vehicle, a shortcut the map doesn't know about.
Open Refine and the map invites you to "Drag route points to adjust the path". Pull the route line onto the road you want and it re-routes through that point. Each drag adds a waypoint, and each one can be undone — or removed later with Remove waypoint. The estimated time updates as you go, so you can see what your preferred road costs against the route Routerra picked.
When you're happy, save; you'll get "Route saved successfully". If you leave Refine with drags you haven't saved, it asks first — Discard route changes?, with Discard Changes and Keep Editing — so you can't lose the work by clicking away.
The phone app has no equivalent. Its map shows your route but the line isn't draggable. Refining a path is something to do in the browser.
Once you have an order to drive, head to Drive your route.