New record Costume party
87% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 368,953 didn't finish the costume. 61,311 requests came from honest bots, led by Googlebot.
Monday, Oct 19, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
1,002,714
fake browsers
▲ +34% vs the day before
87%
of "browsers"
61,311
honest bots
▲ +29% 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 | 360,035 | 276 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 177,521 | 381 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 121,578 | 287 |
| 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 | 117,976 | 327 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0 | 80,367 | 3 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 | 17,341 | 77 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 6,818 | 69 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 | 5,384 | 26 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| Googlebot | 8,810 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 6,391 |
| Bytespider | 2,770 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 2,764 |
| bingbot | 2,658 |
| Hello | 2,133 |
| CensysInspect | 1,576 |
| ClaudeBot | 1,403 |
| l9scan | 1,364 |
| Sogou | 1,321 |
| Baiduspider | 1,295 |
| Amazonbot | 1,234 |
| visionheight.com/scan | 1,177 |
| Reflectionbot | 1,153 |
| ApcosysBot | 1,149 |
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.