Costume party
99% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 107,562 didn't finish the costume. 42,421 requests came from honest bots, led by ClaudeBot.
Sunday, Oct 11, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
153,644
fake browsers
▼ -33% vs the day before
99%
of "browsers"
42,421
honest bots
▲ +15% 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 | 103,857 | 62 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) Chrome/120.0.0.0 | 19,288 | 6 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 2,067 | 56 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 | 2,023 | 50 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 1,848 | 65 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 1,608 | 98 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/147.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 1,236 | 10 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/124.0.0.0 | 1,017 | 54 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | 38,822 |
| Reflectionbot | 1,124 |
| l9scan | 744 |
| CensysInspect | 406 |
| Hello | 362 |
| visionheight.com/scan | 211 |
| Googlebot | 173 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 166 |
| bingbot | 132 |
| AgentTrustBot | 44 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 38 |
| facebookexternalhit | 36 |
| MJ12bot | 19 |
| QlyzeBot | 19 |
| GPTBot | 17 |
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.