Costume party
81% of "browsers" were bots in costume.
Their TLS handshakes gave them away. 27,301 didn't finish the costume. 74,954 requests came from honest bots, led by Mozilla/5.0.
Edition of Friday, Oct 23, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest · updated every 24 hours
445,769
fake browsers
▼ -56% vs the day before
81%
of "browsers"
74,954
honest bots
▲ +1.9% 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 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 103,855 | 372 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 100,857 | 645 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 | 93,551 | 269 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 | 18,956 | 87 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 | 9,564 | 54 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 | 9,466 | 204 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/131.0.0.0 | 9,411 | 1 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0 | 7,970 | 168 |
Honest bots
Bots that said who they were, including AI crawlers.
| Bot | Requests |
|---|---|
| Mozilla/5.0 | 6,638 |
| Googlebot | 5,439 |
| bingbot | 3,936 |
| Bytespider | 3,234 |
| ClaudeBot | 3,206 |
| facebookexternalhit | 3,017 |
| OAI-SearchBot | 2,877 |
| Applebot | 2,656 |
| Amazonbot | 2,485 |
| Baiduspider | 1,917 |
| GPTBot | 1,757 |
| PerplexityBot | 1,665 |
| TLM-Audit-Scanner/2.0 | 1,272 |
| ApcosysBot | 1,235 |
| DuckAssistBot | 1,216 |
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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