New record Costume party
84% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 181,443 didn't finish the costume. 124,552 requests came from honest bots, led by ClaudeBot.
Monday, Oct 12, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
430,497
fake browsers
▲ +180% vs the day before
84%
of "browsers"
124,552
honest bots
▲ +194% 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 | 174,582 | 3,275 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 45,606 | 294 |
| 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 | 36,566 | 153 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 32,420 | 164 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36 | 13,073 | 7 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 | 11,296 | 58 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/147.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 4,615 | 27 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:77.0) Gecko/20190101 Firefox/77.0 | 4,535 | 1 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | 79,216 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 5,068 |
| Googlebot | 2,923 |
| CensysInspect | 2,857 |
| l9scan | 2,666 |
| Hello | 2,417 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 2,007 |
| bingbot | 1,975 |
| Reflectionbot | 1,946 |
| GPTBot | 1,270 |
| Bytespider | 1,051 |
| Amazonbot | 980 |
| Baiduspider | 903 |
| Applebot | 891 |
| PerplexityBot | 888 |
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.