- Cloudflare claims global traffic saw a 19% increase in 2025, with Facebook and Google taking the top spots
- However, bots accounted for a significant share, averaging 7% more than human traffic.
- Googlebot accounted for 4.5% of HTML requests
Global internet traffic grew by 19% in 2025, with Google and Facebook once again consolidating their positions as the world’s most popular websites for the fourth year in a row.
Cloudflare’s 2025 Top Internet Trends report, which highlights traffic patterns, internet trends and security insights, identified a significant shift around August 2025, where traffic began to skyrocket.
The most visited AI service (unsurprisingly) was OpenAI, ahead of Anthropic, Perplexity and Gemini – with Grok/xAI stumbling to 9th place behind Character.[.]AI, Windsurf AI and QuilBot.
Bot traffic
This year, AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML requests, but Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5%, as it scours the web for content to train its model.
This raises concerns among both content creators and website owners because increased traffic “does not translate into end-user referrals to source websites” – therefore site owners are actively missing out on legitimate human traffic.
Non-AI bots are also a major concern: they generated half of HTML page requests in 2025, 7% more than human-generated traffic, and can even reach 25% more at certain times of the year.
Cloudflare mitigated 6% of global network traffic, including 3.3% as a DDoS attack, and general mitigations applied to over 10% of traffic from over 30 countries. This is a trend in cybersecurity, with AI-based threats now hitting businesses from all angles.
“The Internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally reimagined. From AI to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare.
“While we celebrated several Internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what “scale” means, and saw the traditional business model of creating online content face serious challenges.”
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