CTO
David is the CTO of TechnologyChecker, responsible for the engineering and architecture behind the platform's crawling infrastructure. Before joining TechnologyChecker, he spent five years at Google on the Search team, where he worked on large-scale crawling and indexing systems that shaped his approach to building high-performance data infrastructure.
He oversees the detection systems that scan over 50 million domains monthly, ensuring accurate and timely identification of technology stacks across the web. His work focuses on scalable data pipelines, real-time processing, and maintaining detection accuracy across HTTP headers, JavaScript libraries, DNS records, and HTML patterns.
Based in Edinburgh, David is a devoted single malt whisky enthusiast when he's not architecting distributed systems.
We pulled Q1 2026 data from Cloudflare Radar's global network — 81M+ HTTP requests/second across 125+ countries. 31% of all traffic is bots. AI crawlers now represent 22% of bot traffic with Applebot surging 140% in a single month. 60% of login attempts use leaked credentials. And 93.7% of web traffic runs on modern TLS. Here are the 15 numbers that matter.
David Thomson
We pulled 90 days of Q1 2026 email security data from Cloudflare Radar and cross-referenced it against Valimail, Red Sift, the Verizon DBIR, and the FBI IC3 report. DMARC pass rates hit 88.99%, but only 42% of domains actually enforce it. SPF jumped 6 points YoY to 80.24%, BEC losses hit $2.77B, and 27.61% of email still uses deprecated TLS 1.0. Here's what the numbers say about email authentication maturity.
David Thomson
Cloudflare Radar, HTTP Archive, W3Techs, and a 2024 ACM paper all point to the same Q1 2026 reality. HTTP/1.x holds 27.8% of requests, HTTP/3 has plateaued, and the reason is physics, not procrastination.
David Thomson
Q1 2026 analysis of robots.txt across Cloudflare's network reveals which AI crawlers get blocked most, crawl-to-refer ratios by operator, blocking trends, and a data-driven framework for your AI bot policy.
David Thomson
What technologies do software development companies actually use? We analyzed 176,114 software development domains and broke down adoption by company size: small businesses, mid-market, and enterprise.
David Thomson
We process 80% of global CT logs — 8.7B certificates in Q1 2026 — to detect backend technologies invisible to competitors. See the full Q1 2026 CA market share, RSA vs ECDSA trends, and what certificates reveal about tech stacks.
David Thomson