Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

New record Costume party

99% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 58,863 didn't finish the costume. 36,958 requests came from honest bots, led by ClaudeBot.

Saturday, Oct 10, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

Costume Party: 99% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

227,962

fake browsers

▲ +136% vs the day before

99%

of "browsers"

36,958

honest bots

▼ -13% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
ClaudeBot 33,811
Reflectionbot 1,136
Googlebot 735
l9scan 403
CensysInspect 292
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 10

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) Chrome/120.0.0.0 114,055 16
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 54,333 62
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 8,632 108
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36 3,884 3
Mozilla/5.0 3,191 22
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 2,974 94
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0 2,103 72
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 2,071 68

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
ClaudeBot 33,811
Reflectionbot 1,136
Googlebot 735
l9scan 403
CensysInspect 292
Mozilla/5.0 116
AgentTrustBot 68
bingbot 59
ApcosysBot 49
Twitterbot 22
Applebot 20
OAI-SearchBot 16
ChatGLM-Spider 16
wpbot 16
GPTBot 15

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.

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