Cloudflare has released its 2025 Radar Year in Review report, offering a detailed look at how the internet evolved over the year based on traffic observed across its global network. The report draws on data from January 1 to December 2, 2025, covering traffic, AI activity, adoption trends, connectivity issues, security incidents, and email threats. According to Cloudflare, the review reflects insights gathered from handling tens of millions of HTTP requests and DNS queries per second across more than 125 countries.
Global internet traffic and usage trends
The report shows that global internet traffic grew by 19% in 2025, with growth accelerating from August onward. Traffic remained largely flat during the first half of the year before increasing steadily through September, October, and November. Several regions recorded sharp spikes driven by infrastructure changes, satellite internet adoption, and temporary disruptions such as government-imposed shutdowns and natural disasters.
Cloudflare also noted that Starlink traffic more than doubled globally in 2025, with rapid increases following service launches in over 20 new countries and regions. In countries where Starlink was already active before 2025, traffic growth remained significant, indicating broader adoption of satellite-based connectivity.
AI crawlers and bot activity
Artificial intelligence played a central role in shaping internet traffic patterns during 2025. The report highlights that crawl volume from Googlebot, which serves both search indexing and AI training purposes, far exceeded that of other AI crawlers. AI “user action” crawling, driven by bots that fetch pages in response to chatbot queries, increased more than fifteen times over the year.
Cloudflare’s analysis shows that AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML request traffic in 2025, while Googlebot alone accounted for about 4.5%. The report also found that AI crawlers were the most frequently fully disallowed user agents in robots.txt files, reflecting growing concerns among content publishers.
Security, encryption, and cyber threats
On the security front, Cloudflare reported that 6% of global traffic passing through its network was mitigated as potentially malicious or restricted based on customer-defined rules. Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks continued to grow in size and frequency throughout the year.
A key development highlighted in the report is the rapid adoption of post-quantum encryption. The share of human-generated web traffic using post-quantum encrypted TLS 1.3 connections rose from 29% at the start of 2025 to 52% by early December, driven in part by operating system updates on mobile devices.
Connectivity, devices, and platforms
The review also examines device usage and protocol adoption. iOS devices generated 35% of global mobile traffic in 2025, with iOS accounting for more than half of mobile traffic in several countries. HTTP/3 adoption continued to spread, accounting for 21% of global requests, while HTTP/2 remained the most widely used protocol.
What the report indicates
Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review underscores how AI systems, encryption standards, and evolving attack methods are reshaping the internet. The findings suggest that traffic growth, automation, and security challenges are increasingly interconnected, setting the tone for how the internet may continue to evolve in the coming years.
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