- Cloudflare says global traffic to grow 19% by 2025, with Facebook and Google taking the top spots
- However, bots made up a significant portion, averaging 7% higher than human traffic
- Googlebot accounted for 4.5% of HTML requests
Global internet traffic increased 19% in 2025, with Google and Facebook once again cementing their positions as the two most popular internet sites around the world for the fourth consecutive year.
Cloudflare’s 2025 Top Internet Trends report, which highlights traffic patterns, internet trends and security insights, identified a significant shift around August 2025, when traffic began to increase.
The most visited AI service (perhaps unsurprisingly) was OpenAI, ahead of Anthropic, Perplexity and Gemini – with Grok/xAI stumbling down to 9th place after 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 trawls the web for content to train its model.
This is causing concern among content creators and website owners alike, as the increase in traffic ‘doesn’t mean end users are being directed back to the source websites’ – so website owners are actively missing out on legitimate human traffic as a result.
Non-AI bots are also a serious concern – as they generated half of requests for HTML pages in 2025 – 7% over human-generated traffic, even growing to as much as 25% more at certain times of the year.
Cloudflare throttled 6% of global traffic over its network – with 3.3% of traffic throttled as a DDoS attack, with blanket restrictions applied to over 10% of traffic from over 30 countries. This represents a trend in cyber security where AI-driven threats are now hitting businesses from all angles.
“The Internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From artificial intelligence to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, everyday life 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 online content creation face major challenges.”
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