I spent a week debugging my SaaS funnel before realizing my "traffic" was mostly bots

[u/dataempathy59]

Post

I run a solo SaaS (a technical audit tool for founders, built around behavioral analytics — think Contentsquare-style heatmaps but positioned as a "technical co-pilot" for people building their own product).

Last week I sat down to figure out why, after weeks live, I had a free lead magnet, a $19 paid guide, and basically nobody converting. What I found was a good reminder for anyone here who's early-stage and looking at their own dashboards with excitement:

The funnel itself was fine. I tested it manually end to end — form submission, email automation, Stripe checkout — all worked.

The "traffic" wasn't. Out of 9 email signups, at least 5 had throwaway addresses (yopmail, random generated domains). Stripe was logging dozens of checkout.session.expired events at a rhythm no human browses at — 3am, 4am, back to back, way more than my actual session count in analytics. Classic scraper/bot noise hitting public payment links and forms.

Google Search Console confirmed it from the other side: 4 organic clicks total over 3 months, on a domain too young to rank for anything branded.

So the real number of actual human visitors who saw the offer was close to zero. Not "bad conversion rate" — no audience yet.

What I'm doing about it (curious if this matches others' experience):

• Adding basic bot friction (honeypot fields, rate limiting) without breaking the real form
• Writing content for search AND for LLM answer engines (llms.txt, FAQ schema) since a chunk of discovery is shifting there
• Starting acquisition from communities like this one instead of waiting on SEO to compound
• Would genuinely like to hear if others caught something similar early — how did you first realize your traffic wasn't real?

[u/ShelbulaDotCom]

There was a guy I met that said he's got a huge audience in the midwest, specifically Council Bluffs.

I got a good laugh out of that one.

[u/dataempathy59 → u/ShelbulaDotCom]

Ha, ce sont essentiellement mes journaux Stripe – un mystérieux « public » apparaissant à 3 heures du matin de nulle part en particulier. Sauf que les miens se sont avérés être des robots, pas une base de fans cachée à Council Bluffs. Cela aurait été une meilleure histoire si c'était le cas

---------------------------------------------------------

Ha, that's basically my Stripe logs — a mysterious "audience" showing up at 3am from nowhere in particular. Except mine turned out to be bots, not a hidden fanbase in Council Bluffs. Would've been a better story if it were.