New record Costume party
90% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 256,143 didn't finish the costume. 103,919 requests came from honest bots, led by ClaudeBot.
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
943,044
fake browsers
▲ +119% vs the day before
90%
of "browsers"
103,919
honest bots
▼ -17% 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 | 248,931 | 3,877 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 152,641 | 422 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 151,070 | 523 |
| 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 | 147,226 | 381 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0 | 72,788 | 6 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 | 15,972 | 72 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 11,756 | 101 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:133.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/133.0 | 7,271 | 135 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | 77,245 |
| Googlebot | 2,139 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 1,925 |
| Hello | 1,865 |
| Reflectionbot | 1,743 |
| l9scan | 1,426 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 1,329 |
| bingbot | 1,084 |
| CensysInspect | 1,021 |
| NetcraftSurveyAgent | 999 |
| facebookexternalhit | 852 |
| Bytespider | 748 |
| visionheight.com/scan | 612 |
| GPTBot | 520 |
| Baiduspider | 486 |
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.