- Cloudflare says global traffic saw a 19% increase in 2025, with Facebook and Google taking the top spots
- However, bots accounted for a significant portion, averaging 7% more than human traffic.
- Googlebot accounted for 4.5% of HTML requests
Global Internet traffic increased by 19% in 2025, and Google and Facebook once again consolidated their positions as the two most popular Internet sites worldwide for the fourth year in a row.
Cloudflare’s Top Internet Trends 2025 report, which highlights traffic patterns, Internet trends, and security insights, identified a significant shift around August 2025, when traffic began to skyrocket.
The most visited AI service (perhaps unsurprisingly) was OpenAI, ahead of Anthropic, Perplexity and Gemini, with Grok/xAI falling to ninth place behind Character.[.]AI, Windsurfing AI and QuilBot.
Robot traffic
This year, AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML requests, but Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5% as it crawls the web for content to train its model.
This raises concern among both content creators and website owners, as the increase in traffic “does not translate into end users being referred to the originating websites,” so site owners are actively losing legitimate human traffic as a result.
Non-AI robots are also a serious concern, generating half of the requests to HTML pages in 2025, 7% more than human-generated traffic, and even growing up to 25% more at certain times of the year.
Cloudflare mitigated 6% of global traffic across its network, with 3.3% of traffic mitigated as a DDoS attack, with overall mitigations applied to more than 10% of traffic coming from more than 30 countries. This represents a trend in cybersecurity, where AI-powered threats now affect businesses from all angles.
“The Internet is not just changing, it is being fundamentally reshaped. From AI to the most 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 witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face major challenges.”
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