Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Costume party

70% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 9,046 didn't finish the costume. 87,029 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.

Monday, Oct 26, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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Costume Party: 70% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

415,093

fake browsers

▼ -19% vs the day before

70%

of "browsers"

87,029

honest bots

▲ +24% vs the day before

Name tags honest bots
Mozilla/5.0 9,622
Googlebot 7,664
bingbot 4,122
facebookexternalhit 3,744
Bytespider 3,407
↳ The handshake doesn't lie.

Every edition: fake browsers

Oct 7 Oct 26

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 76,073 658
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 75,740 222
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 66,008 442
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0 15,928 309
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 8,616 21
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:151.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/151.0 7,653 155
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 7,078 172
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 6,929 133

Honest bots

Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.

Bot Requests
Mozilla/5.0 9,622
Googlebot 7,664
bingbot 4,122
facebookexternalhit 3,744
Bytespider 3,407
GPTBot 3,175
OAI-SearchBot 3,062
ClaudeBot 2,731
Applebot 2,459
Baiduspider 2,274
Amazonbot 2,207
Hello 1,888
PerplexityBot 1,809
DuckAssistBot 1,645
GrokBot 1,577

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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Fraud Desk · Oct 27

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 Most Wanted: Bots' most wanted file: /.env

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The AI Key Heist · Oct 27

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Bots are hunting for AI API keys. Here's whose they want most.

 Cloud Landlords: 88% of scanning came from rented servers.

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Scanners don't own servers. They rent them. Here are the landlords.

 Speedrun: New sites get scanned in under a minute.

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.