Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Costume party

83% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 9,060 didn't finish the costume. 70,445 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.

Sunday, Oct 25, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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Costume Party: 83% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

514,206

fake browsers

▼ -22% vs the day before

83%

of "browsers"

70,445

honest bots

▲ +25% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
Mozilla/5.0 8,000
Googlebot 6,685
bingbot 4,033
Hello 3,778
ClaudeBot 2,825
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 25

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/537.36 131,856 535
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 121,754 495
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 115,659 284
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0 15,602 342
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/156.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 10,640 44
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/131.0.0.0 7,329 1
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 6,139 171
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 6,011 52

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
Mozilla/5.0 8,000
Googlebot 6,685
bingbot 4,033
Hello 3,778
ClaudeBot 2,825
facebookexternalhit 2,810
Bytespider 2,794
OAI-SearchBot 2,019
Amazonbot 1,884
PerplexityBot 1,868
Applebot 1,723
Baiduspider 1,670
PetalBot 1,486
GPTBot 1,339
DuckAssistBot 1,135

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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