Cloudflare year in review: Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025

Global internet traffic grew 19 percent this year. That's according to Cloudflare, which just released its "Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review" report, a look-back on the year in online behavior.

As more and more humans are spending more and more time online than ever before, we're starting to see some cracks in the digital divide. This was the year that AOL dial-up internet officially died (RIP), but also a year in which satellite companies like Starlink brought the internet to some of the most remote corners of Earth.

The report also includes some revealing statistics on the state of the web in 2025. Cloudflare provides a broad range of internet services, and it's one of the core pillars that make up the infrastructure of the internet. The world was reminded of that this year when a Cloudflare outage led to downtime and errors for many popular websites and apps, such as Spotify, Google, Snapchat, Discord, and Nintendo.

Cloudflare also acts as a traffic gatekeeper of sorts for many websites, which also makes the company uniquely qualified to prognosticate about the state of the online world.

You can check out the entire report for yourself, but here are some key takeaways that stuck with us.

AI bots account for a lot of traffic

As AI companies send out crawlers and bots to scrape as much of the internet as they can, many websites are reporting spikes in bot activity. And the Cloudflare Radar report bears this out: AI bots now account for 4.2 percent of all HTML requests, the company says.

Internet traffic primarily grew in the second half of the year

"Our ongoing reliance on the Internet is reflected in continued global Internet traffic growth," Cloudflare says. "This trend line starts mid-January, allowing for Internet activity to normalize following the return to work and school after the New Year."

The company's stats show traffic growing slowly and staying flat from January through July, then growing in the back half of the year.

Google is still the king of the internet

Google is currently sparring with OpenAI on the future of AI — but in terms of internet users, it remains unmatched.

Per Cloudflare, Google is the most popular internet service in the world, followed by Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. ChatGPT didn't even make the top 10.

Google also provides the "highest traffic Verified Bot" (GoogleBot), the top search engine, and the most-used web browser (Chrome).

Android is still more popular than iOS

Cloudflare found that Android devices account for 65 percent of online traffic, while iOS traffic makes up the remainder.

The company notes that this varies widely by region, with iOS adoption peaking at 70 percent in some areas. In the United States, iOS accounts for 56 percent of mobile traffic.

Starlink is helping the internet grow

Love Elon Musk or hate him, there's no denying that his Starlink service played a massive role in the growth of the internet this year.

Starlink saw a 2.3x growth rate over the past year, and that stayed pretty steady throughout. This year, Starlink and SpaceX recorded a major milestone — they launched their 10,000th satelite.

ChatGPT is the top AI service

The report found that ChatGPT is the most popular AI service (as opposite to internet service), which may come as no surprise. What was a surprise? Despite recent advances with Gemini 3, Google Gemini ranked only fourth, with Claude/Anthropic and Perplexity both outranking it.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.