Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Costume party

71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 23,322 didn't finish the costume. 71,476 requests came from honest bots, led by NVIDIABOT.

Tuesday, Oct 27, 2026 (UTC)

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Costume Party: 71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

482,183

fake browsers

▲ +16% vs the day before

71%

of "browsers"

71,476

honest bots

▼ -18% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
NVIDIABOT 8,523
Mozilla/5.0 7,437
GPTBot 5,259
Googlebot 5,174
MochiImageCrawler 3,336
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 27

How I measure

A "browser" is a request whose user agent starts with Mozilla/5.0 and doesn't introduce itself as a bot. It's in costume when its TLS handshake (the JA4 fingerprint) isn't one a real Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari sends. Half a costume is a browser user agent that stops before naming any browser. Honest bots are user agents that say they're a bot, crawler or scanner, grouped by the name they give.

Best costumes

The user agents bots wore most, with a handshake no real browser sends.

User agent Requests Addresses
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 91,462 717
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 86,682 219
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 77,689 476
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0 33,383 682
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 15,432 61
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 10,811 131
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/156.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 10,644 1,644
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.183 Safari/537.36 8,898 52

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
NVIDIABOT 8,523
Mozilla/5.0 7,437
GPTBot 5,259
Googlebot 5,174
MochiImageCrawler 3,336
bingbot 3,287
facebookexternalhit 3,191
OAI-SearchBot 2,746
ClaudeBot 2,085
CensysInspect 1,986
Applebot 1,884
Bytespider 1,412
Hello 1,294
TLM-Audit-Scanner/2.0 1,272
Baiduspider 1,251

Past editions

Oct 27 Oct 26 Oct 25 Oct 24 Oct 23 Oct 22 Oct 21 Oct 20 Oct 19 Oct 18 Oct 17 Oct 16 Oct 15 Oct 14 Oct 13 Oct 12 Oct 11 Oct 10 Oct 9 Oct 8 Oct 7

A new one every morning.

Follow @MrNiceTry on X for each day's numbers, and the odd story about what the bots get up to.

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 Most Wanted: Bots' most wanted file: /.env

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Bots are hunting for AI API keys. Here's whose they want most.

 Cloud Landlords: 88% of scanning came from rented servers.

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Scanners don't own servers. They rent them. Here are the landlords.

 Speedrun: New sites get scanned in under a minute.

Speedrun · Oct 27

New sites get scanned in under a minute.

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