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ZDNET Highlights
- The Internet has become larger and more fragile than ever due to major attacks.
- Much of that growth is driven by bots and AI crawlers.
- We are increasingly using smartphones and satellites to access the web.
According to Cloudflare, the Internet’s second-largest content delivery network (CDN), Global internet traffic to increase by nearly 20% in 2025You and I watching more YouTube videos is not driving that growth, Most of this growth comes from bots, AI crawlers, and automated attacks rather than human users, At the same time, satellite connectivity, post-quantum encryption, and mobile-heavy usage have reshaped how and where people access the Internet,
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cloudflare’s 2025 radar year in review It shows that global Internet traffic is increasing by approximately 19% year on year, with growth accelerating from late summer to November. Behind that overall growth, non-human activity expanded even more rapidly. A significant portion of the global traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network was classified as bot traffic, which included search crawlers, AI agents, and outright malicious automation.
The rise of bots and AI crawlers
especially, 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 botsAI bots are taking the lead. These bots put tremendous pressure on websites, generating up to 30 terabit data requests at a time. It is so high that the demand for AI bots is tantamount to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
As a result, AI becomes the 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 RewiredFrom AI to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different,”
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googlebot Crawling millions of sites for both traditional search indexing and AI training, again generated the highest request volume for Cloudflare. Googlebot accounted for about 4.5% of all HTML requests on Cloudflare-protected sites in 2025 and reached 11.6% of unique pages in a focused AI-crawler sample.
Googlebot outperforms other AI-oriented crawlers — like OpenAI’s GPTPotThe next most active AI crawler, and Microsoft’s Bingbot –by a wide margin. AI “user action” crawling bots, such as Perplexity user agentwhich brings up pages in response to chatbot prompts or agent workflows, grew more than 15x over the year.
Plus, AI has blurred the line between search traffic and chatbot usage. For example, these days I am more likely to use confused to search Instead of Google. Cloudflare’s new AI bot protection for websites helps them manage and defend against overly aggressive AI bots that constantly scour their sites.
How we access the web in 2025
The way we access the internet continues to tilt in favor of smartphones. Today, 43% of us use smartphones to access the Internet, only 57% still use PCs. Digging deeper, while Apple iOS devices dominate in the US, iOS accounts for about 35% of global mobile traffic worldwide. Globally, Android remained the volume leader with 65%. The market share of other mobile operating systems is negligible.
As far as web browsers go, it’s no surprise that, according to Cloudflare’s calculations, Google Chrome is the most popular browser, with a 67.9% share of the desktop market and 85.4% of the mobile market. On desktop, Edge, Microsoft’s Chrome-based browser, has 14.4%. Firefox? It has come down to 6.7%.
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Within the United States, the federal government Digital Analytics Program (DAP)with Running count of last 90 days of US government website visitsChrome also tops the list with 64.6%. Next is Safari with 22.8%, thanks to America’s love affair with the iPhone, followed by Edge at 7.4%, and Firefox at a steadily declining 1.7%.
The new wave of AI-first web browsers, like ChatGPS Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and Dia, are still just a wave with no meaningful presence on traffic charts. Given the security and privacy concerns regarding the use of AI web browsers, they will never gain popularity. Stay tuned.
Where do we go on the Internet?
No surprises here. you can probably guess top five websites: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram.
However, the more you look, the more interesting it becomes. For example, in the AI field, ChatGPT is at the top, followed by Cloud/Anthropic at second place and Perplexity at third place. Copilot? It is in sixth place. Microsoft is putting Copilot in everything, and Windows Kitchen Sink doesn’t work.
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Among the top five social networks, with Facebook at the top, there is a surprise. LinkedIn is in fifth place. twitter/x? It is in sixth place.
YouTube continues to dominate video streaming. Netflix is in second place, followed by Twitch, Roku (yes, Roku), and then Disney+ in fifth place.
How fast is the internet?
For most of us, the Internet has become faster. However, overall, 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 performs better. in November, America ranks 8th in the worldCanada is at 17th and the UK is at 43rd. In terms of mobile speed, the US ranks 8th in average mobile download speed with around 279 Mbps. Canada ranked 54th with an average mobile download speed of about 140 Mbps. The UK ranked 57th with speeds of around 125Mbps.
We are using satellites to access the network
Satellite Internet moved from early-adopter novelty to mainstream infrastructure. Data from Cloudflare shows Starlink traffic more than doubling globally in 2025, with total request volume increasing nearly 2.3x during the year. This growth coincided with the launch of services in more than 20 new countries and territories, and continued expansion into markets where Starlink was already available.
This expansion is bringing broadband to rural areas, where Starlink has become the default option for users wanting fast internet. The impact on Cloudflare’s network was seen as new clusters of traffic appeared in areas with previously low activity, 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 The more than 3,200-satellite LEO constellation is scheduled to enter commercial service in a limited number of markets early next year.
Encryption goes after quantum
More than half of all human-driven web traffic is now using post-quantum-encrypted TLS 1.3 connections. Its adoption rate has increased from 29% in early 2025 to 52% as of early December. Mobile operating system updates that enable post-quantum key exchange by default are driving this change.
Cloudflare’s report marks this as a turning point: more than half of human web traffic is now secure against future large-scale quantum decryption, at least at the handshake level. Along with that change, HTTP/3 continued to proliferate, accounting for about one-fifth of global requests, even as HTTP/2 remained the dominant protocol.
A more busy, more brittle, more hostile network
The Internet of 2025 wasn’t just big; It was also more aggressive and delicate. Cloudflare reports that about 6% of global traffic coming to its network this year was potentially malicious or needed to be restricted under customer rules, reflecting ongoing DDoS campaigns, credential stuffing attacks and other automated abuse. Hyper-volumetric DDoS events, large-scale floods that exceed network capacity limits, continued to grow in both size and frequency.
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How bad are DDoS attacks? as per latest Cloudflare DDoS reportattacks from Aisuru botnetWith its army of at least 1 million hosts, it regularly exceeded one terabit per second (Tbps). This means, Brian Krebs said krebs on safetythat “the volume of outgoing traffic from infected systems on these ISPs is often So much so that it may disrupt or degrade Internet service To the ISP’s adjacent (non-botted) customers.” In other words, these attacks are so large that even if you are 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 go back to the massive Cloudflare failures around the world. This year also saw major disruptions at AWS, Microsoft Azure/Microsoft 365, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Zoom, and SentinelOne.
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The largest disruptions caused critical websites and services to be down for hours. All of this serves as a painful reminder of how centralized and fragile the Internet has become.
Frankly, I’m worried about today’s Internet. We are more dependent on it than ever. Even a few hours of downtime of any major service slows down the work. If we ever suffered a truly massive Internet failure lasting several days, the global economy would collapse.
