Costume party
49% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 16 didn't finish the costume. 298 requests came from honest bots, led by l9scan.
Wednesday, Oct 7, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest
189
fake browsers
49%
of "browsers"
298
honest bots
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 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:125.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/125.0 | 49 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 49 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 11 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 9 | 3 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 8 | 2 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:139.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/139.0 | 7 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 7 | 2 |
| 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 | 7 | 2 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| l9scan | 61 |
| ClaudeBot | 47 |
| Mozilla/5.0 | 23 |
| claudebot | 14 |
| LRVL-Livewire-Scanner/1.0 | 13 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 12 |
| Bravebot | 10 |
| GPTBot | 8 |
| YouBot | 8 |
| Applebot | 8 |
| Amazonbot | 7 |
| KimiBot | 7 |
| Claude-SearchBot | 6 |
| perplexitybot | 6 |
| GrokBot | 6 |
Past editions
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.
More from yesterday
Bot Weather · Oct 8
77% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.
How much of yesterday's web traffic was scanners, as a weather report.
Fraud Desk · Oct 8
29,885 requests got turned away at the door.
Login stuffing, failed logins, and who got turned away at the door.
Most Wanted · Oct 8
Bots' most wanted file: /.env
The files bots asked for most yesterday. It's usually your .env.
The AI Key Heist · Oct 8
Bots went hunting for AI keys 847 times.
Bots are hunting for AI API keys. Here's whose they want most.
Cloud Landlords · Oct 8
89% of scanning came from rented servers.
Scanners don't own servers. They rent them. Here are the landlords.
Speedrun · Oct 8
New sites get scanned in 171 minutes.
How many minutes a brand-new website gets before the first scanner shows up.