Cloudflare published its 2025 Internet activity report this week, revealing several insights and developments. The San Francisco-based web infrastructure company reported a 19 percent increase in overall Internet traffic, with most of the growth occurring in the latter half of the year. The report also noted a rise in artificial intelligence (AI) bot activity, with 4.2 percent of HTML requests coming from non-human sources. Furthermore, Cloudflare found that Google remains the most popular online destination.
The report, titled “2025 Year in Review,” detailed Internet patterns and key trends for the year. It highlighted that global Internet traffic grew by 19 percent, with a noted flat growth in the first half of the year, followed by a sharp increase starting in August. This trend corresponds with the return of students to school and companies planning future targets.
Google maintained its position as the most visited domain, emphasizing its significant influence on the web. Google Search was identified as the largest source of human web traffic globally. Technologies from Google, including Chrome, Android, and Googlebot, continued to perform well in user access and automated web crawling. Cloudflare’s data indicates that Googlebot remains the most active crawler on the Internet, underscoring the connection between search indexing and AI-driven retrieval.
Following Google in popularity were Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram, completing the top five Internet services. Rounding out the top ten were AWS, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, and WhatsApp. In the generative AI sector, OpenAI retained its lead, with its chatbot followed by Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI.
The report also addressed the growing impact of AI on the Internet. It noted that Googlebot’s crawl volume was the highest, and user-driven AI bot crawling grew by 15 times in 2025. An interesting finding was that Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratio among AI and search platforms, reaching 500,000:1, indicating that most users of the platform were not visiting the cited links. This trend suggests a focus on providing answers that make citations unnecessary, potentially impacting monetization for content websites.
Perplexity emerged as the best performer in crawl-to-refer ratios in the AI space, fluctuating between 100:1 and 700:1 throughout the year. DuckDuckGo excelled in this metric as well, maintaining a ratio of 1:1 to 1.5:1. Google began the year with a 3:1 ratio, peaked at 30:1 in April, and finished the year below 10:1.
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