The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review highlights how AI, post‑quantum encryption, satellite Internet, and record‑breaking DDoS attacks reshaped the global Internet in 2025.
Internet traffic and services
- Global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with growth accelerating from August through year‑end, and some countries like Botswana more than tripling versus baseline.
- The top 10 Internet services still start with Google and Facebook, but there were notable shifts in the middle ranks and new entrants in categories like generative AI, e‑commerce, and streaming (e.g., Shopee, HBO Max).
- Starlink traffic more than doubled (about 2.3x), expanding into 20+ new countries/regions and driving huge usage spikes where service was newly launched or rapidly adopted.
AI bots and crawling behavior
- Googlebot remained the single largest source of request traffic to Cloudflare, crawling millions of sites for both search indexing and AI model training.
- Across HTML traffic, other AI bots generated about 4.2% of requests, while Googlebot alone accounted for about 4.5%.
- AI “user action” crawling (when bots fetch content in response to user queries in tools like chatbots) increased more than 15x during 2025, mapping closely to growth in ChatGPT‑User traffic.
- Among major AI and search platforms, Anthropic showed the highest crawl‑to‑refer ratio, indicating heavy crawling with relatively low referral traffic, whereas Perplexity tended to send more user visits per crawl.
- AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and CCBot were the most frequently fully disallowed user agents in robots.txt files, reflecting publisher concerns about AI training use.
Post‑quantum encryption and adoption
- The share of human‑generated Web traffic using post‑quantum‑enabled encryption nearly doubled, from 29% at the start of 2025 to about 52% by early December.
- iOS 26’s update, which advertises support for hybrid post‑quantum key exchange in TLS 1.3, triggered sharp jumps in post‑quantum traffic, especially in mobile‑heavy markets such as Puerto Rico and Kuwait.
- On Cloudflare Workers AI, Meta’s llama‑3‑8b‑instruct was the most popular model, and text generation was the most common task type.
Connectivity, outages, and IPv6
- Cloudflare observed 174 major Internet outages worldwide; almost half were caused by government‑directed regional or nationwide shutdowns, with others tied to natural disasters and infrastructure incidents.
- Globally, less than one‑third of dual‑stack requests used IPv6, but India exceeded two‑thirds IPv6 usage, with several other countries also above 50%, while many markets still remained under 10%.
- In 117 countries/regions, more than half of request traffic comes from mobile devices, and European countries (e.g., Spain) led on many measured quality metrics, often exceeding 200 Mbps download speeds.
Security, bots, and DDoS
- Around 6% of global traffic transiting Cloudflare’s network was mitigated as potentially malicious or due to customer policies, showing a significant hostile background level on the Internet.
- About 40% of global bot traffic came from the United States, with AWS and Google Cloud together responsible for roughly a quarter of all bot traffic.
- Organizations in the “People and Society” sector were the most attacked, and hyper‑volumetric DDoS attack sizes grew significantly over the year.
- More than 5% of analyzed email was classified as malicious; deceptive links, identity deception, and brand impersonation were the most common threats, and nearly all email from .christmas and .lol TLDs was spam or malicious.
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Secure Your Digital World with ANP Technology
The trends in this report—AI‑driven crawling, rapid post‑quantum adoption, satellite‑powered traffic growth, and ever‑larger DDoS attacks—show how quickly the threat landscape is evolving and how vital it is to continuously strengthen cyber defenses.
At ANP Technology, our professional team delivers end‑to‑end cybersecurity solutions, including risk assessment, DDoS and bot mitigation strategy, email and anti‑scam protection, and secure cloud and network architecture tailored to your business.
We are here to help you interpret these global trends and translate them into a practical security roadmap for your organization.📩 Need guidance or a tailored security plan? Contact ANP Technology for a consultation today.
