New record Costume party
90% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 30,063 didn't finish the costume. 73,569 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.
Edition of Thursday, Oct 22, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest · updated every 24 hours
1,005,568
fake browsers
▲ +42% vs the day before
90%
of "browsers"
73,569
honest bots
▼ -31% vs the day before
Every edition: fake browsers
How we 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 | 307,798 | 859 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 280,382 | 590 |
| 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 | 264,082 | 773 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 | 19,988 | 101 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 14,321 | 29 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 | 8,132 | 63 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 5,929 | 163 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 5,639 | 612 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| Mozilla/5.0 | 7,911 |
| Googlebot | 5,345 |
| Bytespider | 5,196 |
| bingbot | 3,616 |
| ClaudeBot | 3,274 |
| Applebot | 2,505 |
| facebookexternalhit | 2,454 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 2,367 |
| Baiduspider | 2,280 |
| GPTBot | 2,179 |
| Amazonbot | 1,824 |
| TLM-Audit-Scanner/2.0 | 1,273 |
| PerplexityBot | 1,205 |
| robot | 1,126 |
| DuckAssistBot | 1,062 |
Past editions
More from the edge
Bot Weather · Nov 11
20% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.
How much of yesterday's web traffic was scanners, as a weather report.
Fraud Desk · Nov 11
32,669 requests got turned away at the door.
Login stuffing, failed logins, and who got turned away at the door.
Most Wanted · Nov 11
Bots' most wanted file: /download.php
The files bots asked for most yesterday. It's usually your .env.
The AI Key Heist · Nov 11
Bots went hunting for AI keys 789 times.
Bots are hunting for AI API keys. Here's whose they want most.
Cloud Landlords · Nov 11
81% of scanning came from rented servers.
Scanners don't own servers. They rent them. Here are the landlords.
Speedrun · Nov 11
New sites get scanned in 1,245 minutes.
How many minutes a brand-new website gets before the first scanner shows up.
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