Cloudflare report reveals global internet internet traffic grew 19% in 2025 - but a lot of it was just bots

Virtual assistant and CRM software automation technology. Customer using online service with chat bot to get support.

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Cloudflare says global traffic saw a 19% rise in 2025, with Facebook, Google taking top spots
However bots made up a significant portion, averaging 7% higher than humans traffic
Googlebot accounted for 4.5% of HTML requests

Global internet traffic rose 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 year running.

Cloudflare’s 2025 Top Internet Trends report, which highlights traffic patterns, internet trends, and security insights, identified a significant shift around August 2025 where traffic began to soar.

The most visited AI service (perhaps unsurprisingly) was OpenAI, ahead of Anthropic, Perplexity, and Gemini - with Grok/xAI stumbling down in 9th place behind 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 raises concern amongst content creators and website owners alike, as the rise in traffic ‘does not translate into end users being referred back to the source Web sites’ - so site owners actively miss out on legitimate human traffic as a result.

Non-AI bots are also a serious concern - as they generated half of the requests to HTML pages in 2025 - 7% above human-generated traffic, even growing to as much as 25% more at certain points in the year.

Cloudflare mitigated 6% of global traffic over its network - with 3.3% of traffic mitigated as a DDoS attack, with general mitigations applied to over 10% of traffic coming from over 30 countries. This represents a trend in cybersecurity, with AI-driven threats now hitting businesses from every angle.

“The Internet isn't just changing, it's being fundamentally rewired. From AI, to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, everyday is different,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare.

“While we celebrated several Internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what 'scale' means, and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges.”

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Ellen has been writing for almost four years, with a focus on post-COVID policy whilst studying for BA Politics and International Relations at the University of Cardiff, followed by an MA in Political Communication. Before joining TechRadar Pro as a Junior Writer, she worked for Future Publishing’s MVC content team, working with merchants and retailers to upload content.

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