By Alimat Aliyeva
The Cloudflare platform has released its 2025 Internet traffic report, highlighting significant trends. Human activity now accounts for less than half of global web traffic, with non-AI bots generating 47.9% of the traffic and AI-powered bots contributing an additional 4.2% of HTML query traffic.
According to Cloudflare, Googlebot remains the largest source of bot traffic, utilized for both search indexing and AI training. Microsoft’s Bingbot serves similar functions, albeit on a smaller scale. Geographically, the United States generates 40% of total bot traffic.
Overall, global Internet traffic grew by 19% in 2025, compared to 17% in 2024. Mobile devices accounted for 43% of requests, up from 41% the previous year. Cloudflare’s security systems blocked or restricted 6.2% of all traffic as potentially malicious, and the company reported over 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks throughout the year. Nearly half of the observed Internet outages were government-imposed, often to curb exam cheating or enforce regulations.
In terms of the most visited services, Google remains at the top, followed by Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Among social networks, X dropped to sixth place, behind LinkedIn and Snapchat. In the AI sector, ChatGPT was the most visited service, with Anthropic Claude in second place, followed by Perplexity and Google Gemini. Elon Musk’s Grok ranked ninth, slightly ahead of China’s DeepSeek.
The year also featured two internal Cloudflare outages, highlighting vulnerabilities even in advanced digital ecosystems. In November, a change in database access rights caused widespread disruptions, and in December, a web firewall adjustment temporarily disabled websites of large organizations.
Cloudflare’s report also points to structural vulnerabilities in the Internet beyond cyber attacks. A notable issue is the slow adoption of IPv6, intended to address the IPv4 address shortage. Less than a third of requests from dual-stack devices use IPv6, as providers continue relying on NAT technology to extend the life of IPv4 infrastructure. While this approach preserves legacy systems, it hinders progress toward a more scalable and secure architecture—essential for combating DDoS attacks and the increasing presence of AI-training bots.
The report emphasizes a key trend: the Internet of 2025 is becoming increasingly automated and bot-driven, with its resilience depending on both cybersecurity and technological modernization.
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