Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Costume party

89% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 25,015 didn't finish the costume. 56,356 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.

Saturday, Oct 24, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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Costume Party: 89% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

657,341

fake browsers

▲ +48% vs the day before

89%

of "browsers"

56,356

honest bots

▼ -25% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
Mozilla/5.0 5,499
Googlebot 3,875
bingbot 3,647
ClaudeBot 3,614
facebookexternalhit 2,824
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 24

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/537.36 162,468 588
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 159,775 893
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 156,555 334
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/131.0.0.0 20,812 1
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 17,089 80
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0 10,454 225
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/156.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 10,417 46
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 7,191 40

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
Mozilla/5.0 5,499
Googlebot 3,875
bingbot 3,647
ClaudeBot 3,614
facebookexternalhit 2,824
Hello 2,163
Bytespider 2,094
OAI-SearchBot 1,921
Amazonbot 1,811
Applebot 1,764
Baiduspider 1,640
ApcosysBot 1,448
PetalBot 1,290
l9scan 1,148
GPTBot 1,128

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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