How many bots connect here?

Published on 15 October 2026 · Thibaut Tresse

At the top of the map, next to the people online, a counter shows "bot connections filtered". Here is what it counts, how, and what escapes it.

What the number counts

Every browser that opens the page establishes a real-time connection with the server. Every connection is sorted: recognised human, or bot. The counter adds up, since midnight UTC, the connections classified as bots. A bot that reconnects ten times counts ten times: it is a number of connections, not a number of distinct bots. It starts again from zero every day at midnight UTC.

How we recognise them

Four clues, from the simplest to the surest.

It says so. Many tools announce it in their browser identifier (User-Agent): curl, python, HeadlessChrome, or the name of a search engine. An empty identifier counts too.
It does not come from a browser. A browser always sends the Origin header when it opens a real-time connection (RFC 6455, section 4.1). A script that forgets it gives itself away.
It declares itself driven by a program. An automated browser exposes navigator.webdriver (MDN), and the page tells the server.
It fails Cloudflare's check. For everything else, the page asks Turnstile, Cloudflare's bot check, for a token without asking you anything, and the server verifies it. Three refused tokens: bot. A connection that never asks to be verified is classified as a bot too, if it leaves after 20 seconds or is still there after 5 minutes.

Turnstile examines the IP address and the browser to reach its verdict (its privacy notice). If Cloudflare is down, nobody is accused: the page tries again.

What the number does not count

Bots that only read the page, search engines and AI crawlers, do not open a real-time connection: Googlebot, for instance, does not support WebSockets (Google Search Central). So they are not counted. The number underestimates non-human traffic: it only sees the bots that tried to enter the live feed.

What it changes

A bot sees the site like everyone else but leaves no trace: it does not appear on the globe, scores no point and does not speak in the chat. Without this sorting, a script could inflate the number of people present, the records and the ranking. The sorting has limits, which we accept: a visitor whom Cloudflare cannot check (outage, check blocked by an extension) stays invisible without being counted as a bot, and a bot that perfectly imitates a browser only trips on Turnstile. You see your own verdict under your address, with its reason.

The figures

The site has been online since 15 October 2026: too early for an honest statistic. We will publish orders of magnitude here after a few weeks: share of filtered connections, most frequent reasons, peak hours. Until then, today's counter is on the home page, and it starts again from zero every night.