Cloudflare's top Internet trends for 2025

Source: Cloudflare Radar. Sources of bot traffic by geography. While the US is responsible for the lion's share of bot traffic - defined as any non-human Internet traffic - Singapore, China, and India are also in the top 10 list. Over seventy percent (71%) of bot traffic observed by Cloudflare in 2025 came from the top 10 countries/regions, and that a significant amount of it comes from networks associated with cloud platform providers.

Cloudflare, the connectivity cloud company, has published its 6th annual Year in Review, showing how the Internet behaved in 2025. The report highlights the most significant Internet trends, traffic patterns, and security insights from the past year.

2025 marked a notable shift in how much society depends on the Internet, Cloudflare said. Global Internet traffic grew by 19% year-over-year, while AI advanced, and security experienced major milestones.

Post-quantum encryption now secures 52% of all human traffic to ensure Internet users are protected from future threats. However, this growth has also brought challenges, with a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare leading to more than 25 record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

“The Internet isn't just changing, it's being fundamentally rewired. From AI, to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, everyday is different. While we celebrated several Internet milestones (in 2025), we also blocked attacks that redefined what 'scale' means, and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare.

“With a huge percentage of the Internet running through Cloudflare’s network every second of every day, we believe we have a unique responsibility to help navigate these changes and build a better Internet for everyone.”

Highlights of Cloudflare’s Year in Review for 2025 include: 

- Google and Meta’s reign: Google and Facebook (now Meta) locked in their positions as the two most popular Internet services globally for the 4th consecutive year, while ChatGPT held onto the number one spot in the generative AI category. 

- The AI bot wars hosted a single dominant player: Google's crawling bot dwarfed activity from all other leading AI bots, making it the single biggest source of automated Internet traffic. 

- Cybercriminals target new segments: For the first time, civil society and non-profit organisations became the most attacked sector, likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data. 

- Governments accounted for major outages: Nearly half of all major Internet disruptions observed globally were triggered by government actions, even as outages caused by cable cuts dropped nearly 50% and those linked to power failures doubled.

This data comes from Cloudflare Radar, a free tool that lets anyone view global trends and insights across the Internet. Radar is powered by data from Cloudflare’s global network (one of the world’s largest, spanning 330+ cities in 120+ countries), plus aggregated and anonymised data from Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 public DNS Resolver, widely used as a fast and private way to browse the Internet.