Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

New record Costume party

90% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 30,063 didn't finish the costume. 73,569 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.

Thursday, Oct 22, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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Costume Party: 90% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

1,005,568

fake browsers

▲ +42% vs the day before

90%

of "browsers"

73,569

honest bots

▼ -31% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
Mozilla/5.0 7,911
Googlebot 5,345
Bytespider 5,196
bingbot 3,616
ClaudeBot 3,274
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 22

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 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 307,798 859
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 280,382 590
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 264,082 773
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 19,988 101
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 14,321 29
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 8,132 63
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 5,929 163
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 5,639 612

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
Mozilla/5.0 7,911
Googlebot 5,345
Bytespider 5,196
bingbot 3,616
ClaudeBot 3,274
Applebot 2,505
facebookexternalhit 2,454
OAI-SearchBot 2,367
Baiduspider 2,280
GPTBot 2,179
Amazonbot 1,824
TLM-Audit-Scanner/2.0 1,273
PerplexityBot 1,205
robot 1,126
DuckAssistBot 1,062

Past editions

Oct 27 Oct 26 Oct 25 Oct 24 Oct 23 Oct 22 Oct 21 Oct 20 Oct 19 Oct 18 Oct 17 Oct 16 Oct 15 Oct 14 Oct 13 Oct 12 Oct 11 Oct 10 Oct 9 Oct 8 Oct 7

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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 Speedrun: New sites get scanned in under a minute.

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