Costume party
95% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 16,672 didn't finish the costume. 3,706 requests came from honest bots, led by ClaudeBot.
Thursday, Oct 8, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
27,099
fake browsers
▲ +14,238% vs the day before
95%
of "browsers"
3,706
honest bots
▲ +1,144% vs the day before
Every edition: fake browsers
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 | 16,446 | 979 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 2,311 | 29 |
| 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 | 1,728 | 15 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 1,713 | 16 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/131.0.0.0 | 1,477 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36 | 353 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 287 | 3 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/130.0.0.0 | 220 | 15 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | 3,160 |
| Reflectionbot | 130 |
| Googlebot | 65 |
| CensysInspect | 55 |
| AgentTrustBot | 18 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 17 |
| bingbot | 17 |
| PerplexityBot | 13 |
| YouBot | 12 |
| Amazonbot | 12 |
| CCBot | 12 |
| ChatGLM-Spider | 12 |
| perplexitybot | 12 |
| Claude-SearchBot | 12 |
| Bravebot | 11 |
Past editions
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.
More from yesterday
Bot Weather · Oct 27
48% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.
How much of yesterday's web traffic was scanners, as a weather report.
Fraud Desk · Oct 27
457,316 requests got turned away at the door.
Login stuffing, failed logins, and who got turned away at the door.
Most Wanted · Oct 27
Bots' most wanted file: /.env
The files bots asked for most yesterday. It's usually your .env.
The AI Key Heist · Oct 27
Bots went hunting for AI keys 3,362 times.
Bots are hunting for AI API keys. Here's whose they want most.
Cloud Landlords · Oct 27
88% of scanning came from rented servers.
Scanners don't own servers. They rent them. Here are the landlords.
Speedrun · Oct 27
New sites get scanned in under a minute.
How many minutes a brand-new website gets before the first scanner shows up.