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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The internet is bigger and more fragile than ever, thanks to larger attacks.
- Much of that growth is driven by bots and AI crawlers.
- Increasingly, we use smartphones and satellites to access the web.
According to Cloudflare, the internet’s second-largest content delivery network (CDN), global internet traffic grew nearly 20% in 2025. You and I watching more YouTube videos is not what’s driving that growth. Much of this rise comes from bots, AI crawlers, and automated attacks rather than human users. At the same time, satellite connectivity, post-quantum encryption, and mobile-heavy use have reshaped how and where people access the internet.
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Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review shows global internet traffic rising by about 19% year over year, with growth accelerating sharply from late summer through November. Behind that overall growth, non-human activity expanded even faster. A significant share of global traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network was classified as bot traffic, including search crawlers, AI agents, and outright malicious automation.
The rise of bots and AI crawlers
In particular, AI bots are making life miserable for website owners as they strip-mine the net for large language model (LLM) data. Earlier this year, Cloudflare reported that 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots, with AI bots leading the way. These bots put tremendous pressure on websites, generating as many as 30 terabits of data requests in a single surge. That’s high enough that the demands of AI bots amount to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
As a result, AI became a central driver of internet traffic in 2025. As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said in a statement, “The internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different.”
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Googlebot again generated the highest request volume to Cloudflare, crawling millions of sites for both traditional search indexing and AI training. Googlebot is responsible for about 4.5% of all HTML requests across Cloudflare‑protected sites in 2025 and reaches 11.6% of unique pages in a focused AI‑crawler sample.
Googlebot outpaces other AI-oriented crawlers — such as OpenAI’s GPTBot, the next most active AI crawler, and Microsoft’s Bingbot — by a wide margin. AI “user action” crawling bots, such as Perplexity’s user agent, which fetch pages in response to chatbot prompts or agent workflows, grew more than 15-fold over the year.
At the same time, AI has blurred the line between search traffic and chatbot usage. For example, these days I’m much more likely to use Perplexity for search instead of Google. Cloudflare’s new AI bot protection for websites helps manage them and defend against overly aggressive AI bots that constantly scrape their sites.
How we accessed the web in 2025
Cloudflare
How we get to the internet keeps tilting in favor of smartphones. Today, 43% of us use smartphones to access the internet, with only 57% still using PCs. Digging deeper, while Apple iOS devices dominate in the US, iOS accounted for about 35% of global mobile traffic worldwide. Globally, Android remained the volume leader, accounting for 65%. The market share of other mobile operating systems is negligible.
As for web browsers, it’s no surprise that, according to Cloudflare’s count, Google Chrome is the most popular browser, with 67.9% of the desktop market and 85.4% of the mobile market. On the desktop, Edge, Microsoft’s Chrome-based browser, has 14.4%. FireFox? It’s down to 6.7%.
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Inside the US, the federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), with its running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, also has Chrome on top with 64.6%. That’s followed by Safari with 22.8%, thanks to America’s love affair with iPhones, then Edge’s 7.4%, and Firefox limping in at an ever-declining 1.7%.
The new wave of AI-first web browsers, such as ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and Dia, are still just a ripple with no meaningful presence on the traffic charts. Given the security and privacy concerns about using AI web browsers, they may never gain traction. Stay tuned.
Where do we go on the internet?
There are no surprises here. You could probably guess the top five websites: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram.
However, the more you look, the more interesting it gets. For example, in the AI arena, ChatGPT is at the top, followed by Claude/Anthropic in second place, and Perplexity in third. Copilot? It’s in sixth place. Microsoft is putting Copilot into everything, and Windows Kitchen Sink doesn’t seem to be working.
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The top five social networks, with Facebook at the top, have one surprise. LinkedIn is in fifth. Twitter/X? It’s in the sixth spot.
Video streaming remains dominated by YouTube. Netflix is in second place, followed by Twitch, Roku (Yes, Roku), and then Disney+ in fifth.
How fast is the internet?
Cloudflare
For most of us, the internet has gotten faster. Overall, however, Canada, the UK, and the US are not even in the top 20. You’ll find the fastest internet in Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Chile, and South Korea, with average download speeds ranging from 318 to 260 Megabits per second (Mbps).
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In the latest fixed broadband tests, the US does better. In November, the US ranked 8th in the world, with Canada 17th and the UK 43rd. In terms of mobile speeds, the US ranked 8th in median mobile download speed, at about 279 Mbps. Canada ranked 54th, with a median mobile download speed of around 140 Mbps. The UK ranked 57th, with a speed of approximately 125 Mbps.
We’re using satellites to reach the network
Satellite internet moved from early-adopter novelty toward mainstream infrastructure. Cloudflare’s data shows that Starlink traffic more than doubled globally in 2025, with overall request volume increasing by about 2.3 times over the year. That growth coincided with the launch of services in more than 20 new countries and regions, and continued uptake in markets where Starlink was already available.
This expansion is bringing broadband to rural areas, where Starlink has become the default choice for users wanting fast internet. Cloudflare’s network saw the impact as new clusters of traffic appeared in previously low-activity regions, while some markets experienced brief turbulence as terrestrial ISPs adjusted peering and routing to accommodate the new mix.
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Soon, Starlink won’t be the only high-speed, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite ISP. Amazon Leo’s 3,200-plus-satellite LEO constellation is scheduled to enter commercial service in limited markets early next year.
Encryption goes post‑quantum
More than half of people-driven web traffic is now using post-quantum–encrypted TLS 1.3 connections. Its adoption rate has climbed from 29% at the start of 2025 to 52% by early December. Mobile operating system updates that enabled post-quantum key exchange by default are driving this change.
Cloudflare’s report positions this as a turning point: More than half of human web traffic it sees is now protected against future large-scale quantum decryption, at least at the handshake level. Alongside that shift, HTTP/3 continued to spread, accounting for roughly one-fifth of global requests, even as HTTP/2 remained the dominant protocol.
A busier, more brittle, more hostile network
The 2025 internet was not just bigger; it was also more assaulted and fragile. Cloudflare reports that approximately 6% of global traffic traversing its network this year required mitigation as potentially malicious or restricted under customer rules, reflecting ongoing DDoS campaigns, credential stuffing attacks, and other automated abuse. Hyper-volumetric DDoS incidents, massive floods that push the limits of network capacity, continued to grow in both size and frequency.
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How bad are the DDoS attacks? According to the latest Cloudflare DDoS report, attacks from the Aisuru botnet, with its army of at least 1 million hosts, routinely exceeded one terabit per second (Tbps). This means, said Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security, that “the volume of outgoing traffic from infected systems on these ISPs is often so high that it can disrupt or degrade internet service for adjacent (non-botted) customers of the ISPs.” In other words, these attacks are so big that even if you’re not targeted, your local internet will still be slowed down.
Outages and deliberate shutdowns also left visible scars on the year’s traffic graphs. Cloudflare’s outage tracking shows that nearly half of the observed disruptions were linked to government-ordered internet shutdowns.
Other incidents were attributed to infrastructure failures, routing issues, and natural disasters. Two of these went back to massive, worldwide Cloudflare failures. The year also saw major outages for AWS, Microsoft Azure/Microsoft 365, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Zoom, and SentinelOne.
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The biggest outages took down important websites and services for hours at a time. All this served as a painful reminder of how centralized and fragile the internet has become.
Frankly, I’m worried about today’s internet. We depend on it more than ever. Even a few hours of downtime of any of the major services slows work to a crawl. Were we ever to suffer a truly massive internet failure that lasted several days, the global economy would come to a grinding halt.
