You get a notification. Someone commented on your website. You get excited. Maybe this is the post that finally took off. Then you get another. And another.
You didn’t go viral. You have a bot hitting your website. Ugh.
This is one of those dreaded “founder problems” nobody warns you about. And your first instinct might be: who cares, I’ll just block them and move on with my day.
Here’s the problem — they’re not just being annoying. They’re actually trying to cause harm. And as a founder, that’s a business risk, not just a tech nuisance.
There are three things that bots are trying to do when they are hitting your site:
1. They are trying to get your users to click on malicious links.
This is one of the most common angles bots work. Instead of going after your site directly, they’re planting links — in comments, forms, wherever they can get something to post — hoping one slips past your filters and a real visitor clicks it. If someone does, that click can be used to steal their credentials or other personal information, or to quietly install malware on their device. So even if your site itself never gets “hacked,” your customers can still get hurt by something that showed up on your page.
2. They’re probing to see what they can get.
This is the bigger deal, and here’s why: if someone can get malicious code onto your website, the damage isn’t limited to “my site looks weird for a day.” They can go after any data sitting on your site — client information, stored passwords, backend access. Or they can skip data entirely and just deface your site with malicious or embarrassing content, which is a reputational hit you have to clean up in public, in real time, while your customers are watching.
3. They’re trying to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
Enough automated traffic hitting your site at once can cause it to slow down or crash. That means real customers can’t get to it. If this happens while you’re mid-launch, running an ad campaign, or in the middle of a sales push — that’s not a minor inconvenience. That’s lost revenue and a bad first impression at the worst possible moment.
This attack does not cause you to see comments, but would instead cause your site to be abnormally sluggish or unresponsive.
So when that comment notification pings for the fifth time in ten minutes, it’s worth pausing instead of just hitting delete and moving on. That pattern is your website telling you something — and it’s worth a five-minute check rather than a shrug.
If you can’t wait until next week to learn more about what to do, we can do a website audit that will ensure that your website has the necessary checks in place.
Next up: what to actually do about it (without needing a computer science degree).
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