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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways
- The net is bigger and much fragile than ever, acknowledgment to larger attacks.
- Much of that maturation is driven by bots and AI crawlers.
- Increasingly, we usage smartphones and satellites to entree the web.
According to Cloudflare, the internet's second-largest contented transportation web (CDN), global net postulation grew astir 20% successful 2025. You and I watching much YouTube videos is not what's driving that growth. Much of this emergence comes from bots, AI crawlers, and automated attacks alternatively than quality users. At the aforesaid time, outer connectivity, post-quantum encryption, and mobile-heavy usage person reshaped however and wherever radical entree the internet.
Cloudflare's 2025 Radar Year successful Review shows planetary net postulation rising by astir 19% twelvemonth implicit year, with maturation accelerating sharply from precocious summertime done November. Behind that wide growth, non-human enactment expanded adjacent faster. A important stock of planetary postulation passing done Cloudflare's web was classified arsenic bot traffic, including hunt crawlers, AI agents, and outright malicious automation.
The emergence of bots and AI crawlers
In particular, AI bots are making beingness miserable for website owners arsenic they strip-mine the nett for ample connection exemplary (LLM) data. Earlier this year, Cloudflare reported that 30% of planetary web postulation present comes from bots, with AI bots starring the way. These bots enactment tremendous unit connected websites, generating arsenic galore arsenic 30 terabits of information requests successful a azygous surge. That's precocious capable that the demands of AI bots magnitude to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
As a result, AI became a cardinal operator of net postulation successful 2025. As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said successful a statement, "The internet isn't conscionable changing, it's being fundamentally rewired. From AI to much originative and blase menace actors, each time is different."
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Googlebot again generated the highest petition measurement to Cloudflare, crawling millions of sites for some accepted hunt indexing and AI training. Googlebot is liable for astir 4.5% of each HTML requests crossed Cloudflare‑protected sites successful 2025 and reaches 11.6% of unsocial pages successful a focused AI‑crawler sample.
Googlebot outpaces different AI-oriented crawlers -- specified arsenic OpenAI's GPTBot, the adjacent astir progressive AI crawler, and Microsoft's Bingbot -- by a wide margin. AI "user action" crawling bots, specified arsenic Perplexity's user agent, which fetch pages successful effect to chatbot prompts oregon cause workflows, grew much than 15-fold implicit the year.
At the aforesaid time, AI has blurred the enactment betwixt hunt postulation and chatbot usage. For example, these days I'm overmuch much apt to use Perplexity for search alternatively of Google. Cloudflare's caller AI bot protection for websites helps negociate them and support against overly assertive AI bots that perpetually scrape their sites.
How we accessed the web successful 2025
How we get to the net keeps tilting successful favour of smartphones. Today, 43% of america usage smartphones to entree the internet, with lone 57% inactive utilizing PCs. Digging deeper, portion Apple iOS devices predominate successful the US, iOS accounted for astir 35% of planetary mobile postulation worldwide. Globally, Android remained the measurement leader, accounting for 65%. The marketplace stock of different mobile operating systems is negligible.
As for web browsers, it's nary astonishment that, according to Cloudflare's count, Google Chrome is the astir fashionable browser, with 67.9% of the desktop marketplace and 85.4% of the mobile market. On the desktop, Edge, Microsoft's Chrome-based browser, has 14.4%. FireFox? It's down to 6.7%.
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Inside the US, the national government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP), with its running number of the past 90 days of US authorities website visits, besides has Chrome connected apical with 64.6%. That's followed by Safari with 22.8%, acknowledgment to America's emotion matter with iPhones, past Edge's 7.4%, and Firefox limping successful astatine an ever-declining 1.7%.
The caller question of AI-first web browsers, specified arsenic ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and Dia, are inactive conscionable a ripple with nary meaningful beingness connected the postulation charts. Given the security and privateness concerns astir utilizing AI web browsers, they whitethorn ne'er summation traction. Stay tuned.
Where bash we spell connected the internet?
There are nary surprises here. You could astir apt conjecture the top 5 websites: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram.
However, the much you look, the much absorbing it gets. For example, successful the AI arena, ChatGPT is astatine the top, followed by Claude/Anthropic successful 2nd place, and Perplexity successful third. Copilot? It's successful sixth place. Microsoft is putting Copilot into everything, and Windows Kitchen Sink doesn't look to beryllium working.
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The apical 5 societal networks, with Facebook astatine the top, person 1 surprise. LinkedIn is successful fifth. Twitter/X? It's successful the sixth spot.
Video streaming remains dominated by YouTube. Netflix is successful 2nd place, followed by Twitch, Roku (Yes, Roku), and past Disney+ successful fifth.
How accelerated is the internet?
For astir of us, the net has gotten faster. Overall, however, Canada, the UK, and the US are not adjacent successful the apical 20. You'll find the fastest net successful Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Chile, and South Korea, with mean download speeds ranging from 318 to 260 Megabits per 2nd (Mbps).
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In the latest fixed broadband tests, the US does better. In November, the US ranked 8th successful the world, with Canada 17th and the UK 43rd. In presumption of mobile speeds, the US ranked 8th successful median mobile download speed, astatine astir 279 Mbps. Canada ranked 54th, with a median mobile download velocity of astir 140 Mbps. The UK ranked 57th, with a velocity of astir 125 Mbps.
We're utilizing satellites to scope the network
Satellite net moved from early-adopter novelty toward mainstream infrastructure. Cloudflare's information shows that Starlink postulation much than doubled globally successful 2025, with wide petition measurement expanding by astir 2.3 times implicit the year. That maturation coincided with the motorboat of services successful much than 20 caller countries and regions, and continued uptake successful markets wherever Starlink was already available.
This enlargement is bringing broadband to agrarian areas, wherever Starlink has go the default prime for users wanting accelerated internet. Cloudflare's web saw the interaction arsenic caller clusters of postulation appeared successful antecedently low-activity regions, portion immoderate markets experienced little turbulence arsenic terrestrial ISPs adjusted peering and routing to accommodate the caller mix.
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Soon, Starlink won't beryllium the lone high-speed, debased Earth orbit (LEO) outer ISP. Amazon Leo's 3,200-plus-satellite LEO constellation is scheduled to participate commercialized work successful constricted markets aboriginal adjacent year.
Encryption goes post‑quantum
More than fractional of people-driven web postulation is present utilizing post-quantum–encrypted TLS 1.3 connections. Its adoption complaint has climbed from 29% astatine the commencement of 2025 to 52% by aboriginal December. Mobile operating strategy updates that enabled post-quantum cardinal speech by default are driving this change.
Cloudflare's study positions this arsenic a turning point: More than fractional of quality web postulation it sees is present protected against aboriginal large-scale quantum decryption, astatine slightest astatine the handshake level. Alongside that shift, HTTP/3 continued to spread, accounting for astir one-fifth of planetary requests, adjacent arsenic HTTP/2 remained the ascendant protocol.
A busier, much brittle, much hostile network
The 2025 net was not conscionable bigger; it was besides much assaulted and fragile. Cloudflare reports that astir 6% of planetary postulation traversing its web this twelvemonth required mitigation arsenic perchance malicious oregon restricted nether lawsuit rules, reflecting ongoing DDoS campaigns, credential stuffing attacks, and different automated abuse. Hyper-volumetric DDoS incidents, monolithic floods that propulsion the limits of web capacity, continued to turn successful some size and frequency.
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How atrocious are the DDoS attacks? According to the latest Cloudflare DDoS report, attacks from the Aisuru botnet, with its service of astatine slightest 1 cardinal hosts, routinely exceeded 1 terabit per 2nd (Tbps). This means, said Brian Krebs of Krebs connected Security, that "the measurement of outgoing postulation from infected systems connected these ISPs is often so precocious that it tin disrupt oregon degrade net work for adjacent (non-botted) customers of the ISPs." In different words, these attacks are truthful large that adjacent if you're not targeted, your section net volition inactive beryllium slowed down.
Outages and deliberate shutdowns besides near disposable scars connected the year's postulation graphs. Cloudflare's outage tracking shows that astir fractional of the observed disruptions were linked to government-ordered net shutdowns.
Other incidents were attributed to infrastructure failures, routing issues, and earthy disasters. Two of these went backmost to massive, worldwide Cloudflare failures. The twelvemonth besides saw large outages for AWS, Microsoft Azure/Microsoft 365, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Zoom, and SentinelOne.
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The biggest outages took down important websites and services for hours astatine a time. All this served arsenic a achy reminder of however centralized and fragile the net has become.
Frankly, I'm disquieted astir today's internet. We beryllium connected it much than ever. Even a fewer hours of downtime of immoderate of the large services slows enactment to a crawl. Were we ever to endure a genuinely monolithic net nonaccomplishment that lasted respective days, the planetary system would travel to a grinding halt.
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