The watcher, watched
When you stare into the bots, the bots stare back.
This is so meta. I mean, this is me, watching the bots, watching me, watching… you get it.
Bot traffic stats
MrNiceTry.com went live at 9:57 am Pacific. Within 2 seconds of being live, the first visitor was a bot dressed up as Microsoft Edge.
Today it's been 10 days and 13 hours since I saw the first bot on this website. And since then, there have been 1,400 bot visits.
The visitor breakdown
Every visit, every page. A bigger dot means more page reads: the smallest is one, the biggest a few hundred.
| Reader | Home | Reports | Bot Weather | Cloud Landlords | Costume Party | Fraud Desk | Most Wanted | Speedrun | The AI Key Heist | Hi, I'm Mr. Nice Try | How I plan to add 1,900 more websites to the Edge | RSS feed | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | 11/12 | ||||||||||||
| ClaudeBot | 11/12 | ||||||||||||
| GoogleOther | 8/12 | ||||||||||||
| Googlebot | 5/12 | ||||||||||||
| Googlebot-Image | 4/12 | ||||||||||||
| Dataminr | 2/12 | ||||||||||||
| Spoofers | 12/12 | ||||||||||||
| MJ12bot | 11/12 | ||||||||||||
| serpstatbot | 11/12 | ||||||||||||
| Applebot | 11/12 | ||||||||||||
| Dataprovider.com | 10/12 | ||||||||||||
| bingbot | 6/12 | ||||||||||||
| trendictionbot | 3/12 | ||||||||||||
| X | 5/12 | ||||||||||||
| 2/12 | |||||||||||||
| Scripts | 3/12 | ||||||||||||
| People | 9/12 | ||||||||||||
| Mr. Nice Try | 8/12 |
What they think I am
The bad guys never read anything. They come looking for things that aren't here, and every request says what they're hoping for.
- They think I left my .env file lying around..env hunter, 7 addresses 414
- They think I just installed WordPress and haven't finished setting it up.WordPress installer sniper, 50 addresses 194
- They think I run WordPress.WordPress prospector, 13 addresses 151
- They think my config files are public.Config snooper, 6 addresses 142
- They think I run something old and unpatched.Exploit tourist, 5 addresses 112
- They think I deployed my .git folder.Git digger, 7 addresses 82
- They think there's an admin login to guess.Login rattler, 20 addresses 34
- They think there's an API to poke.API prober, 2 addresses 34
The polite ones ask first
Well-behaved crawlers read robots.txt before anything else. Here's who asked, and how often.
- ClaudeBot robots.txt 42 · sitemap 41
- X robots.txt 19 · sitemap 0
- MJ12bot robots.txt 16 · sitemap 0
- Chrome in costume robots.txt 8 · sitemap 6
- Firefox in costume robots.txt 6 · sitemap 4
- Applebot robots.txt 6 · sitemap 0
- SparixEmailScraper robots.txt 3 · sitemap 3
- bingbot robots.txt 5 · sitemap 0
- Googlebot robots.txt 4 · sitemap 0
- trendictionbot robots.txt 3 · sitemap 0
This page is in the log too.
If you're a person: hi, and thanks for reading. If you're a bot: I'll see you in tomorrow's numbers. Nice try.
How I count
Every request that reached mrnicetry.com through the edge since it went live, Oct 9, 2026, 16:57 UTC, up to Oct 13, 06:12 UTC. A bot is counted once per address, and a visit ends after half an hour of quiet. OpenAI's crawlers only count from the addresses OpenAI publishes (or Microsoft's network, where they run); Anthropic's from Amazon's, where every real ClaudeBot here came from; Google's from Google's own. Anyone else wearing those names is a spoofer, and so is a browser user agent whose TLS handshake no real copy of that browser sends. A bad guy is anyone who asked for a path only scanners ask for, like /.env or /wp-login.php, along with the rest of that visit. People are browsers whose handshakes match, on networks that aren't rented servers.