New record Costume party
99% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 16,548 didn't finish the costume. 42,251 requests came from honest bots, led by ClaudeBot.
Friday, Oct 9, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
96,606
fake browsers
▲ +257% vs the day before
99%
of "browsers"
42,251
honest bots
▲ +1,040% 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 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 34,282 | 139 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 | 15,577 | 19 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 9,187 | 20 |
| 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 | 8,383 | 18 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/131.0.0.0 | 2,773 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 14_7_2) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.1 Safari/605.1.15 | 2,706 | 86 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 | 2,675 | 86 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0 | 2,652 | 89 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | 39,149 |
| Reflectionbot | 1,152 |
| l9scan | 589 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 430 |
| CensysInspect | 372 |
| ApcosysBot | 151 |
| AgentTrustBot | 48 |
| GPTBot | 40 |
| Googlebot | 31 |
| Hello | 28 |
| wpbot | 21 |
| Baiduspider | 20 |
| Bytespider | 18 |
| Twitterbot | 12 |
| PerplexityBot | 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.