Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Costume party

81% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 27,301 didn't finish the costume. 74,954 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.

Friday, Oct 23, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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Costume Party: 81% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

445,769

fake browsers

▼ -56% vs the day before

81%

of "browsers"

74,954

honest bots

▲ +1.9% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
Mozilla/5.0 6,638
Googlebot 5,439
bingbot 3,936
Bytespider 3,234
ClaudeBot 3,206
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 23

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 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 103,855 372
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 100,857 645
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 93,551 269
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 18,956 87
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 9,564 54
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 9,466 204
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/131.0.0.0 9,411 1
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0 7,970 168

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
Mozilla/5.0 6,638
Googlebot 5,439
bingbot 3,936
Bytespider 3,234
ClaudeBot 3,206
facebookexternalhit 3,017
OAI-SearchBot 2,877
Applebot 2,656
Amazonbot 2,485
Baiduspider 1,917
GPTBot 1,757
PerplexityBot 1,665
TLM-Audit-Scanner/2.0 1,272
ApcosysBot 1,235
DuckAssistBot 1,216

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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