The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review: The rise of AI, post-quantum, and record-breaking DDoS attacks

The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is here: our sixth annual review of the Internet trends and patterns we observed throughout the year, based on Cloudflare’s expansive network view.

Our view is unique, due to Cloudflare’s global network, which has a presence in 330 cities in over 125 countries/regions, handling over 81 million HTTP requests per second on average, with more than 129 million HTTP requests per second at peak on behalf of millions of customer Web properties, in addition to responding to approximately 67 million (authoritative + resolver) DNS queries per second. Cloudflare Radar uses the data generated by these Web and DNS services, combined with other complementary data sets, to provide near-real time insights into traffic, bots, security, connectivity, and DNS patterns and trends that we observe across the Internet. 

Our Radar Year in Review takes that observability and, instead of a real-time view, offers a look back at 2025: incorporating interactive charts, graphs, and maps that allow you to explore and compare selected trends and measurements year-over-year and across geographies, as well as share and embed Year in Review graphs. 

The 2025 Year In Review is organized into six sections: Traffic, AI, Adoption & Usage, Connectivity, Security, and Email Security, with data spanning the period from January 1 to December 2, 2025. To ensure consistency, we kept underlying methodologies unchanged from previous years’ calculations. We also incorporated several new data sets this year, including multiple AI-related metrics, global speed test activity, and hyper-volumetric DDOS size progression. Trends for over 200 countries/regions are available on the microsite; smaller or less-populated locations are excluded due to insufficient data. Some metrics are only shown worldwide and are not displayed if a country/region is selected. 

In this post, we highlight key findings and interesting observations from the major Year In Review microsite sections, and we have again published a companion Most Popular Internet Services blog post that specifically explores trends seen across top Internet Services.

We encourage you to visit the 2025 Year in Review microsite to explore the datasets and metrics in more detail, including those for your country/region to see how they have changed since 2024, and how they compare to other areas of interest.

We hope you’ll find the Year in Review to be an insightful and powerful tool — to explore the disruptions, advances, and metrics that defined the Internet in 2025. 

Let’s dig in.

Key Findings

Traffic

• Global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with significant growth starting in August. ➜
• The top 10 most popular Internet services saw a few year-over-year shifts, while a number of new entrants landed on category lists. ➜
• Starlink traffic doubled in 2025, including traffic from over 20 new countries/regions. ➜
• Googlebot was again responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2025 as it crawled millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing and AI training. ➜
• The share of human-generated Web traffic that is post-quantum encrypted has grown to 52%. ➜
• Googlebot was responsible for more than a quarter of Verified Bot traffic. ➜

AI

• Crawl volume from dual-purpose Googlebot dwarfed other AI bots and crawlers. ➜
• AI “user action” crawling increased by over 15x in 2025. ➜
• While other AI bots accounted for 4.2% of HTML request traffic, Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5%. ➜
• Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratio among the leading AI and search platforms. ➜
• AI crawlers were the most frequently fully disallowed user agents found in robots.txt files. ➜
• On Workers AI, Meta’s llama-3-8b-instruct model was the most popular model, and text generation was the most popular task type. ➜

Adoption & Usage

• iOS devices generated 35% of mobile device traffic globally — and more than half of device traffic in many countries. ➜
• The shares of global Web requests using HTTP/3 and HTTP/2 both increased slightly in 2025. ➜
• JavaScript-based libraries and frameworks remained integral tools for building Web sites. ➜
• One-fifth of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients. ➜
• Google remains the top search engine, with Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo distant followers. ➜
• Chrome remains the top browser across platforms and operating systems – except on iOS, where Safari has the largest share. ➜

Connectivity

• Almost half of the 174 major Internet outages observed around the world in 2025 were due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of Internet connectivity. ➜
• Globally, less than a third of dual-stack requests were made over IPv6, while in India, over two-thirds were. ➜
• European countries had some of the highest download speeds, all above 200 Mbps. Spain remained consistently among the top locations across measured Internet quality metrics. ➜
• London and Los Angeles were hotspots for Cloudflare speed test activity in 2025. ➜
• More than half of request traffic comes from mobile devices in 117 countries/regions. ➜

Security

• 6% of global traffic over Cloudflare’s network was mitigated by our systems — either as potentially malicious or for customer-defined reasons. ➜
• 40% of global bot traffic came from the United States, with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud originating a quarter of global bot traffic. ➜
• Organizations in the "People and Society” sector were the most targeted during 2025. ➜
• Routing security, measured as the shares of RPKI valid routes and covered IP address space, saw continued improvement throughout 2025. ➜
• Hyper-volumetric DDoS attack sizes grew significantly throughout the year. ➜
• More than 5% of email messages analyzed by Cloudflare were found to be malicious. ➜
• Deceptive links, identity deception, and brand impersonation were the most common types of threats found in malicious email messages. ➜
• Nearly all of the email messages from the .christmas and .lol Top Level Domains were found to be either spam or malicious. ➜

Traffic trends

Global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with significant growth starting in August

To determine the traffic trends over time for the Year in Review, we use the average daily traffic volume (excluding bot traffic) over the second full calendar week (January 12-18) of 2025 as our baseline. (The second calendar week is used to allow time for people to get back into their “normal” school and work routines after the winter holidays and New Year’s Day.) The percent change shown in the traffic trends chart is calculated relative to the baseline value — it does not represent absolute traffic volume for a country/region. The trend line represents a seven-day trailing average, which is used to smooth the sharp changes seen with data at a daily granularity. 

Traffic growth in 2025 appeared to occur in several phases. Traffic was, on average, somewhat flat through mid-April, generally within a couple of percent of the baseline value. However, it then saw growth through May to approximately 5% above baseline, staying in the +4-7% range through mid-August. It was at that time that growth accelerated, climbing steadily through September, October, and November, peaking at 19% growth for the year. Aided by a late-November increase, 2025’s rate of growth is about 10% higher than the 17% growth observed in 2024. In past years, we have also observed traffic growth accelerating in the back half of the year, although in 2022-2024, that acceleration started in July. It’s not clear why this year’s growth was seemingly delayed by several weeks.

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

Botswana saw the highest peak growth, reaching 298% above baseline on November 8, and ending the period 295% over baseline. (More on what accounts for that growth in the Starlink section below.) Botswana and Sudan were the only countries/regions to see traffic more than double over the course of the year, although some others experienced peak increases over 100% at some point during the year.

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, Botswana}

The impact of extended Internet disruptions are clearly visible within the graphs as well. For example, on October 29, the Tanzanian government imposed an Internet shutdown there in response to election day protests. That shutdown lasted just a day, but another one followed from October 30 until November 3. Although traffic in the country had increased more than 40% above baseline ahead of the shutdowns, the disruption ultimately dropped traffic more than 70% below baseline — a rapid reversal. Traffic recovered quickly after connectivity was restored. A similar pattern was observed in Jamaica, where Internet traffic spiked ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Melissa on October 28, and then dropped significantly after the storm caused power outages and infrastructure damage on the island. Traffic began to rebound after the storm’s passing, returning to a level just above baseline by early December.

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, Tanzania}

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, Jamaica}

The top 10 most popular Internet services saw some year-over-year shifts, while the category lists saw a number of new entrants

For the Year in Review, we look at the 11-month year-to-date period. In addition to an “overall” ranked list, we also rank services across nine categories, based on analysis of anonymized query data of traffic to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver from millions of users around the world. For the purposes of these rankings, domains that belong to a single Internet service are grouped together.

Google and Facebook once again held the top two spots among the top 10. Although the other members of the top 10 list remained consistent with 2024’s rankings, there was some movement in the middle. Microsoft, Instagram, and YouTube all moved higher; Amazon Web Services (AWS) dropped one spot lower, while TikTok fell four spots.

^{Top Internet services in 2025, worldwide}

Among Generative AI services, ChatGPT/OpenAI remained at the top of the list. But there was movement elsewhere, highlighting the dynamic nature of the industry. Services that moved up the rankings include Perplexity, Claude/Anthropic, and GitHub Copilot. New entries in the top 10 for 2025 include Google Gemini, Windsurf AI, Grok/xAI, and DeepSeek.

^{Top Generative AI services in 2025, worldwide}

Other categories saw movement within their lists as well – Shopee (“the leading e-commerce online shopping platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan”) is a new entrant to the E-Commerce list, and HBO Max joined the Video Streaming ranking. These categorical rankings, as well as trends seen by specific services, are explored in more detail in a separate blog post.

In addition, this year we are also providing top Internet services insights at a country/region level for the Overall, Generative AI, Social Media, and Messaging categories. (In 2024, we only shared Overall insights.)

Starlink traffic doubled in 2025, including traffic from over 20 new countries/regions

SpaceX Starlink’s satellite-based Internet service continues to be a popular option for bringing connectivity to unserved or underserved areas, as well as to users on planes and boats. We analyzed aggregate request traffic volumes associated with Starlink's primary autonomous system (AS14593) to track the growth in usage of the service throughout 2025. The request volume shown on the trend line in the chart represents a seven-day trailing average. 

Globally, traffic from Starlink continued to see consistent growth throughout 2025, with total request volume up 2.3x across the year. We tend to see rapid traffic growth when Starlink service becomes available in a country/region, and that trend continues in 2025. 

^{Starlink traffic growth in 2025, worldwide}

That’s exactly what we saw in the more than 20 new countries/regions where @Starlink announced availability: within days, Starlink traffic in those places increased rapidly. These included Armenia, Niger, Sri Lanka, and Sint Maarten.

We also saw Starlink traffic from a number of locations that are not currently marked for service availability. However, there are IPv4 and/or IPv6 prefixes associated with these countries in Starlink’s published geofeed. Given the ability for Starlink users to roam with their service (and equipment), this traffic likely comes from roaming users in those areas.

^{Starlink traffic growth in 2025, Niger}

Of countries/regions where service was active before 2025, Benin, Timor-Leste, and Botswana had some of the largest traffic growth, at 51x, 19x, and 16x respectively. Starlink service availability in Benin was first announced in November 2023, Timor-Leste in December 2024, and Botswana in August 2024.

^{Starlink traffic growth in 2025, Botswana}

Similar services, such as Amazon Leo, Eutelsat Konnect, and China’s Qianfan, continue to grow their satellite constellations and move towards commercial availability. We hope to review traffic growth across these services in the future as well.

Googlebot was again responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2025 as it crawled millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing and AI training

To look at the aggregate request traffic Cloudflare saw in 2025 from the entire IPv4 Internet, we can use a Hilbert curve, which allows us to visualize a sequence of IPv4 addresses in a two-dimensional pattern that keeps nearby IP addresses close to each other, making them useful for surveying the Internet's IPv4 address space. Within the visualization, we aggregate IPv4 addresses into /20 prefixes, meaning that at the highest zoom level, each square represents traffic from 4,096 IPv4 addresses. This level of aggregation keeps the amount of data used for the visualization manageable. See the 2024 Year in Review blog post for additional details about the visualization.

For the third year in a row, the IP address block that had the maximum request volume to Cloudflare during 2025 was Google’s 66.249.64.0/20 –  one of several used by the Googlebot web crawler to retrieve content for search indexing and AI training. That a Googlebot IP address block ranked again as the top request traffic source is unsurprising, given the number of web properties on Cloudflare’s network and Googlebot’s aggressive crawling activity. The Googlebot prefix accounted for nearly 4x as much IPv4 request traffic as the next largest traffic source, 146.20.240.0/20, which is part of a larger block of IPv4 address space announced by Rackspace Hosting. As a cloud and hosting provider, Rackspace supports many different types of customers and applications, so the driver of the observed traffic to Cloudflare isn’t known.

^{Zoomed Hilbert curve view showing the address block that generated the highest volume of requests in 2025}

This year, we’ve added the ability to search for an autonomous system (ASN) to the visualization, allowing you to see how broadly a network provider’s IP address holdings are distributed across the IPv4 universe. 

One example is AS16509 (AMAZON-02, used with AWS), which shows the results of Amazon’s acquisitions of large amounts of IPv4 address space over the years. Another example is AS7018 (ATT-INTERNET4, AT&T), which is one of the largest announcers of IPv4 address space in the United States. Much of the traffic we see from this ASN comes from 12.0.0.0/8, a block of over 16 million IPv4 addresses that has been owned by AT&T since 1983.

^{Hilbert curve showing the IPv4 address blocks from AS7018 that sent traffic to Cloudflare in 2025}

The share of human-generated Web traffic that is post-quantum encrypted has grown to 52%

“Post-quantum” refers to a set of cryptographic techniques designed to protect encrypted data from “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks by adversaries that have the ability to capture and store current data for future decryption by sufficiently advanced quantum computers. The Cloudflare Research team has been working on post-quantum cryptography since 2017, and regularly publishes updates on the state of the post-quantum Internet.

After seeing significant growth in 2024, the global share of post-quantum encrypted traffic nearly doubled throughout 2025, from 29% at the start of the year to 52% in early December. 

^{Post-quantum encrypted TLS 1.3 traffic growth in 2025, worldwide}

Twenty-eight countries/regions saw their share of post-quantum encrypted traffic more than double throughout the year, including significant growth in Puerto Rico and Kuwait. Kuwait’s share nearly tripled, from 13% to 37%, and Puerto Rico’s share grew from 20% to 49%. 

Those three were among others that saw significant share growth in mid-September, concurrent with Apple releasing operating system updates, in which “TLS-protected connections will automatically advertise support for hybrid, quantum-secure key exchange in TLS 1.3”. In Kuwait and Puerto Rico, over half of request traffic is from mobile devices, and approximately half comes from iOS devices in both locations as well, so it is not surprising that this software update resulted in a significant increase in post-quantum traffic share

^{Post-quantum encrypted TLS 1.3 traffic growth in 2025, Puerto Rico}

To that end, the share of post-quantum encrypted traffic from Apple iOS devices grew significantly in September after iOS 26 was officially released. Just four days after release, the global share of requests with post-quantum support from iOS devices grew from just under 2% to 11%. By early December, more than 25% of requests from iOS devices used post-quantum encryption.

Googlebot was responsible for more than a quarter of Verified Bot traffic

The new Bots Directory on Cloudflare Radar provides a wealth of information about Verified Bots and Signed Agents, including their operators, categories, and associated user agents, links to documentation, and traffic trends. Verified Bots must conform to a set of requirements as well as being verified through either Web Bot Auth or IP validation. A signed agent is controlled by an end user and a verified signature-agent from their Web Bot Auth implementation, and must conform to a separate set of requirements.

Googlebot is used to crawl Web site content for search indexing and AI training, and it was far and away the most active bot seen by Cloudflare throughout 2025. It was most active between mid-February and mid-July, peaking in mid-April, and was responsible for over 28% of traffic from Verified Bots. Other Google-operated bots that were responsible for notable amounts of traffic included Google AdsBot (used to monitor Web sites where Google ads are served), Google Image Proxy (used to retrieve and cache images embedded in email messages), and GoogleOther (used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites).

OpenAI’s GPTBot, which crawls content for AI training, was the next most active bot, originating about 7.5% of Verified Bot traffic, with fairly volatile crawling activity during the first half of the year. Microsoft’s Bingbot crawls Web site content for search indexing and AI training and generated 6% of Verified Bot traffic throughout the year, showing relatively stable activity. 

^{Verified Bot traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

Search engine crawlers and AI crawlers are the two most active Verified Bot categories, with traffic patterns mapping closely to the leading bots in those categories, including GoogleBot and OpenAI’s GPTBot. Search engine crawlers were responsible for 40% of Verified Bot traffic, with AI crawlers generating half as much (20%). Search engine optimization bots were also quite active, driving over 13% of requests from Verified Bots.

^{Verified Bot traffic trends by category in 2025, worldwide}

AI insights

 Crawl volume from dual-purpose Googlebot dwarfed other AI bots and crawlers

In September, a Cloudflare blog post laid out a proposal for responsible AI bot principles, one of which was “AI bots should have one distinct purpose and declare it.” In the AI bots best practices overview on Radar, we note that several bot operators have dual-purpose crawlers, including Google and Microsoft.

Because Googlebot crawls for both search engine indexing and AI training, we have included it in this year’s AI crawler overview. In 2025, its crawl volume dwarfed that of other leading AI bots. Request traffic began to increase in mid-February, peaking in late April, and then slowly declined through late July. After that, it grew gradually into the end of the year. Bingbot also has a similar dual purpose, although its crawl volume is a fraction of Googlebot’s. Bingbot’s crawl activity trended generally upwards across the year.

^{AI crawler traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

OpenAI’s GPTBot is used to crawl content that may be used in training OpenAI's generative AI foundation models. Its crawling activity was quite volatile across the year, reaching its highest levels in June, but it ended November slightly above the crawl levels seen at the beginning of the year. 

Crawl volume for OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User, which visits Web pages when users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT questions, saw sustained growth over the course of the year, with a weekly usage pattern becoming more evident starting in mid-February, suggesting increasing usage at schools and in the workplace. Peak request volumes were as much as 16x higher than at the beginning of the year. A drop in activity was also evident in the June to August timeframe, when many students were out of school and many professionals took vacation time. 

OAI-SearchBot, which is used to link to and surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features, saw crawling activity grow gradually through August, then several traffic spikes in August and September, before starting to grow more aggressively heading into October, with peak request volume during a late October spike approximately 5x higher than the beginning of the year.

^{OpenAI crawler traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

Crawling by Anthropic’s ClaudeBot effectively doubled through the first half of the year, but gradually declined during the second half, returning to a level approximately 10% higher than the start of the year. Perplexity’s PerplexityBot crawling traffic grew slowly through January and February, but saw a big jump in activity from mid-March into April. After that, growth was more gradual through October, before seeing a significant increase again in November, winding up about 3.5x higher than where it started the year.

^{ClaudeBot traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

^{PerplexityBot traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

ByteDance’s Bytespider, one of 2024’s top AI crawlers, saw crawling volume below several other training bots, and its activity dropped across the year, continuing the decline observed last year.

AI “user action” crawling increased by over 15x in 2025

Most AI bot crawling is done for one of three purposes: training, which gathers Web site content for AI model training; search, which indexes Web site content for search functionality available on AI platforms; and user action, which visits Web sites in response to user questions posed to a chatbot. Note that search crawling may also include crawling for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enables a content owner to bring their own data into LLM generation without retraining or fine-tuning a model. (A fourth “undeclared” purpose captures traffic from AI bots whose crawling purpose is unclear or unknown.)

Crawling for model training is responsible for the overwhelming majority of AI crawler traffic, reaching as much as 7-8x search crawling and 32x user action crawling at peak. The training traffic figure is heavily influenced by OpenAI’s GPTBot, and as such, it followed a very similar pattern through the year.

Crawling for search was strongest through mid-March, when it dropped by approximately 40%. It returned to more gradual growth after that, though it ended the surveyed time period just under 10% lower than the start of the year.

User action crawling started 2025 with the lowest crawl volume of the three defined purposes, but more than doubled through January and February. It again doubled in early March, and from there, it continued to grow throughout the year, up over 21x from January through early December. This growth maps very closely to the traffic trends seen for OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User bot.

^{User action crawler traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

While other AI bots accounted for 4.2% of HTML request traffic, Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5%

AI bots have frequently been in the news during 2025 as content owners raise concerns about the amount of traffic that they are generating, especially as much of it does not translate into end users being referred back to the source Web sites. To better understand the impact of AI bot crawling activity, as compared to non-AI bots and human Web usage, we analyzed request traffic for HTML content across Cloudflare’s customer base and classified it as coming from a human, an AI bot, or another “non-AI” type of bot. (Note that because we are focusing on just HTML content here, the bot and human shares of traffic will differ from that shown on Radar, which analyzes request traffic for all content types.) Because Googlebot crawls so actively, and is dual-purpose, we have broken its share out separately in this analysis.

Throughout 2025, we found that traffic from AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML requests. The share varied widely throughout the year, dropping as low as 2.4% in early April, and reaching as high as 6.4% in late June.

To that end, non-AI bots started 2025 responsible for half of requests to HTML pages, seven percentage points above human-generated traffic. This gap grew as wide as 25 percentage points during the first few days of June. However, these traffic shares began to draw closer together starting in mid June, and starting on September 11, entered a period where the human generated share of HTML traffic sometimes exceeded that of non-AI bots. As of December 2, human traffic generated 47% of HTML requests, and non-AI bots generated 44%.

Googlebot is a particularly voracious crawler, and this year it originated 4.5% of HTML requests, a share slightly larger than AI bots in aggregate. Starting the year at just under 2.5%, its share ramped quickly over the next four months, peaking at 11% in late April. It subsequently fell back towards its starting point over the next several months, and then grew again during the second half of the year, ending with a 5% share. This share shift largely mirrors Googlebot’s crawling activity as discussed above.

^{HTML traffic shares by bot type in 2025, worldwide}

Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratio among the leading AI and search platforms

We launched the crawl-to-refer ratio metric on Radar on July 1 to track how often a given AI or search platform sends traffic to a site relative to how often it crawls that site. A high ratio means a whole lot of AI crawling without sending actual humans to a Web site.

It can be a volatile metric, with the values shifting day-by-day as crawl activity and referral traffic change. This metric compares total number of requests from relevant user agents associated with a given search or AI platform where the response was of Content-type: text/html by the total number of requests for HTML content where the Referer header contained a hostname associated with a given search or AI platform. 

Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratios this year, reaching as much as 500,000:1, although they were quite erratic from January through May. Both the magnitude and erratic nature of the metric was likely due to sparse referral traffic over that time period. After that, the ratios became more consistent, but remained higher than others, ranging from ~25,000:1 to ~100,000:1.

OpenAI’s ratios over time were quite spiky, and reached as much as 3,700:1 in March. These shifts may be due to the stabilization of GPTBot crawling activity, coupled with increased usage of ChatGPT search functionality, which includes links back to source Web sites within its responses. Users following those links would increase Referer counts, potentially lowering the ratio. (Assuming that crawl traffic wasn’t increasing at a similar or greater rate.)

Perplexity had the lowest crawl-to-refer ratios of the major AI platforms, starting the year below 100:1 before spiking in late March above 700:1, concurrent with a spike of crawl traffic seen from PerplexityBot.  Settling back down after the spike, peak ratio values generally remained below 400:1, and below 200:1 from September onwards.

Among search platforms, Microsoft’s ratio unexpectedly exhibited a cyclical weekly pattern, reaching its lowest levels on Thursdays, and peaking on Sundays. Peak ratio values were generally in the 50:1 to 70:1 range across the year. Starting the year just over 3:1, Google’s crawl-to-refer ratio increased steadily through April, reaching as high as 30:1. After peaking, it fell somewhat erratically through mid-July, dropping back to 3:1, although it has been slowly increasing through the latter half of 2025. DuckDuckGo’s ratio remained below 1:1 for the first three calendar quarters of 2025, but experienced a sudden jump to 1.5:1 in mid-October and stayed elevated for the remainder of the period.

^{AI & search platform crawl-to-refer ratios in 2025, worldwide}

AI crawlers were the most frequently fully disallowed user agents found in robots.txt files

The robots.txt file, formally defined in RFC 9309 as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a text file that content owners can use to signal to Web crawlers which parts of a Web site the crawlers are allowed to access, using directives to explicitly allow or disallow search and AI crawlers from their whole site, or just parts of it. The directives within the file are effectively a “keep out” sign and don’t provide any formal access control. Having said that, Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt feature automatically updates a site’s existing robots.txt or creates a robots.txt file on the site that includes directives asking popular AI bot operators to not use the content for AI model training. In addition, our AI Crawl Control capabilities can track violations of a site’s robots.txt directives, and give the site owner the ability to block requests from the offending user agent.

On Cloudflare Radar, we provide insight into the number of robots.txt files found among our top 10,000 domains and the full/partial disposition of the allow and disallow directives found within the files for selected crawler user agents. (In this context, “full” refers to directives that apply to the whole site, and “partial” refers to directives that apply to specified paths or file types.) Within the Year in Review microsite, we show how the disposition of these directives changed over the course of 2025.

The user agents with the highest number of fully disallowed directives are those associated with AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and CCBot. The directives for Googlebot and Bingbot crawlers, used for both search indexing and AI training, leaned heavily towards partial disallow, likely focused on cordoning off login endpoints and other non-content areas of a site. For these two bots, directives applying to the whole site remained a small fraction of the total number of disallow directives observed through the year. 

^{Robots.txt disallow directives by user agent}

The number of explicit allow directives found across the discovered robots.txt files was a fraction of the observed disallow directives, likely because allow is the default policy, absent any specific directive. Googlebot had the largest number of explicit allow directives, although over half of them were partial allows. Allow directives targeting AI crawlers were found across fewer domains, with directives targeting OpenAI’s crawlers leaning more towards explicit full allows. 

Google-Extended is a user agent token that web publishers can use to manage whether content that Google crawls from their sites may be used for training Gemini models or providing site content from the Google Search index to Gemini, and the number of allow directives targeting it tripled during the year — most partially allowed access at the start of the year, while the end of the year saw a larger number of directives that explicitly allowed full site access than those that allowed access to just some of the site’s content. 

^{Robots.txt allow directives by user agent}

On Workers AI, Meta’s llama-3-8b-instruct model was the most popular model, and text generation was the most popular task type

The AI model landscape is rapidly evolving, with providers regularly releasing more powerful models, capable of tasks like text and image generation, speech recognition, and image classification. Cloudflare collaborates with AI model providers to ensure that Workers AI supports these models as soon as possible following their release, and we recently acquired Replicate to greatly expand our catalog of supported models. In February 2025, we introduced visibility on Radar into the popularity of publicly available supported models as well as the types of tasks that these models perform, based on customer account share. 

Throughout the year, Meta’s llama-3-8b-instruct model was dominant, with an account share (36.3%) more than three times larger than the next most popular models, OpenAI’s whisper (10.1%) and Stability AI’s stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0 (9.8%). Both Meta and BAAI (Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence) had multiple models among the top 10, and the top 10 models had an account share of 89%, with the balance spread across a long tail of other models.

^{Most popular models on Workers AI in 2025, worldwide}

Task popularity was driven in large part by the top models, with text generation, text-to-image, and automatic speech recognition topping the list. Text generation was used by 48.2% of Workers AI customer accounts, nearly four times more than the text-to-image share of 12.3% and automatic speech recognition’s 11.0% share. 

^{Most popular tasks on Workers AI in 2025, worldwide}

What’s being crawled

In addition to the year-to-date analysis presented above, below we present point-in-time analyses of what is being crawled. Note that these insights are not included in the Year in Review microsite.

Crawling by geographic region

Within the AI section of Year in Review, we are looking at traffic from AI bots and crawlers globally, without regard for the geography associated with the account that owns the content being crawled. If we drill down a level geographically, using data from October 2025, and look at which bots generate the most crawling traffic for sites owned by customers with a billing address in a given geographic region, we find that Googlebot accounts for between 35% and 55% of crawler traffic in each region.

OpenAI’s GPTBot or Microsoft’s Bingbot are second most active, with crawling shares of 13-14%. In the developed economies across North America, Europe, and Oceania, Bingbot maintains a solid lead over AI crawlers. But for sites based in fast-growing markets across South America and Asia, GPTBot holds a slimmer lead over Bingbot.

Crawling by industry

In analyzing AI crawler activity by customer industry during October 2025, we found that Retail and Computer Software consistently attracted the most AI crawler traffic, together representing just over 40% of all activity.

Others in the top 10 accounted for much smaller shares of crawling activity. These top 10 industries accounted for just under 70% of crawling, with the balance spread across a long tail of other industries.

^{Industry share of AI crawling activity, October 2025}

Adoption & usage

iOS devices generated 35% of mobile device traffic globally – and more than half of device traffic in many countries

The two leading mobile device operating systems globally are Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. By analyzing information in the User-Agent header included with each Web request, we can calculate the distribution of traffic by client operating system throughout the year. Android devices generate the majority of mobile device traffic globally, due to the wide distribution of price points, form factors, and capabilities of such devices.

Globally, the share of traffic from iOS grew slightly year-over-year, up two percentage points to 35% in 2025. Looking at the top countries for iOS traffic share, Monaco had the highest share, at 70%, and iOS drove 50% or more of mobile device traffic in a total of 30 countries/regions, including Denmark (65%), Japan (57%), and Puerto Rico (52%).

^{Distribution of mobile device traffic by operating system in 2025, worldwide}

For countries/regions with higher Android usage, the shares were significantly larger. Twenty-seven had Android adoption above 90% in 2025, with Papua New Guinea the highest at 97%. Sudan, Malawi, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia also registered an Android share of 95% or more. Android was responsible for 50% or more of mobile device traffic in 175 countries/regions, with the Bahamas’ 51% share placing it at the bottom of that list. 

^{Distribution of iOS and Android usage in 2025}

The shares of global Web requests using HTTP/3 and HTTP/2 both increased slightly in 2025

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the protocol that makes the Web work. Over the last 30+ years, it has gone through several major revisions. The first standardized version, HTTP/1.0, was adopted in 1996, HTTP/1.1 in 1999, and HTTP/2 in 2015. HTTP/3, standardized in 2022, marked a significant update, running on top of a new transport protocol known as QUIC. Using QUIC as its underlying transport allows HTTP/3 to establish connections more quickly, as well as deliver improved performance by mitigating the effects of packet loss and network changes. Because it also provides encryption by default, using HTTP/3 mitigates the risk of attacks. 

Globally in 2025, 50% of requests to Cloudflare were made over HTTP/2, HTTP/1.x accounted for 29%, and the remaining 21% were made via HTTP/3. These shares are largely unchanged from 2024 — HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 gained just fractions of a percentage point this year.

^{Distribution of traffic by HTTP version in 2025, worldwide}

Geographically, usage of HTTP/3 appears to be both increasing and spreading. Last year, we noted that we had found eight countries/regions sending more than a third of their requests over HTTP/3. In 2025, 15 countries/regions sent more than a third of requests over HTTP/3, with Georgia’s 38% adoption just exceeding 2024’s top adoption rate of 37% in Réunion. (Looking at historical data, Georgia started the year around 46% HTTP/3 adoption, but dropped through the first half of the year before leveling off.) Armenia had the largest increase in HTTP/3 adoption year-over-year, jumping from 25% to 37%. 

Seven countries/regions saw overall HTTP/3 usage levels below 10% due to high levels of bot-originated HTTP/1.x traffic. These include Hong Kong, Dominica, Singapore, Ireland, Iran, Seychelles, and Gibraltar. 

JavaScript-based libraries and frameworks remained integral tools for building Web sites

To deliver a modern Web site, developers must capably integrate a growing collection of libraries and frameworks with third-party tools and platforms. All of these components must work together to ensure a performant, feature-rich, problem-free user experience. As in past years, we used Cloudflare Radar’s URL Scanner to scan Web sites associated with the top 5,000 domains to identify the most popular technologies and services used across eleven categories. 

jQuery is self-described as a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library, and our scan found it on 8x as many sites as Slick, a JavaScript library used to display image carousels. React remained the top JavaScript framework used for building Web interfaces, found on twice as many scanned sites as Vue.js. PHP, node.js, and Java remained the most popular programming languages/technologies, holding a commanding lead over other languages, including Ruby, Python, Perl, and C.

^{Top Web site technologies, JavaScript libraries category in 2025}

WordPress remained the most popular content management system (CMS), though its share of scanned sites dropped to 47%, with the difference distributed across gains seen by multiple challengers. HubSpot and Marketo remained the top marketing automation platforms, with a combined share 10% higher YoY. Among A/B testing tools, VWO’s share grew by eight percentage points year-over-year, extending its lead over Optimizely, while Google Optimize, which was sunsetted in September 2023, saw its share fall from 14% to 4%.

One-fifth of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the foundation of modern dynamic Web sites and both Web-based and native applications. These sites and applications rely heavily on automated API calls to provide customized information. Analyzing the Web traffic protected and delivered by Cloudflare, we can identify requests being made to API endpoints. By applying heuristics to these API-related requests determined to not be coming from a person using a browser or native mobile application, we can identify the top languages used to build API clients.

In 2025, 20% of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients, representing significant growth from Go’s 12% share in 2024. Python’s share also increased year-over-year, growing from 9.6% to 17%. Java jumped to third place, reaching an 11.2% share, up from 7.4% in 2024. Node.js, last year’s second-most popular language, saw its share fall to just 8.3% in 2025, pushing it down to fourth place, while .NET remained at the bottom of the top five, dropping to just 2.3%.

^{Most popular automated API client languages in 2025}

Google remains the top search engine, with Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo distant followers

Cloudflare is in a unique position to measure search engine market share because we protect websites and applications for millions of customers. To that end, since the fourth quarter of 2021, we have been publishing quarterly reports on this data. We use the HTTP referer header to identify the search engine sending traffic to customer sites and applications, and present the market share data as an overall aggregate, as well as broken out by device type and operating system. (Device type and operating system insights are based on the User-Agent and Client Hints HTTP request headers.)

Globally, Google referred the most traffic to sites protected and delivered by Cloudflare, with a nearly 90% share in 2025. The other search engines in the top 5 include Bing (3.1%), Yandex (2.0%), Baidu (1.4%), and DuckDuckGo (1.2%). Looking at trends across the year, Yandex dropped from a 2.5% share in May to a 1.5% share in July, while Baidu grew from 0.9% in April to 1.6% in June.

^{Overall search engine market share in 2025, worldwide}

Yandex users are primarily based in Russia, where the domestic platform holds a 65% market share, almost double that of Google at 34%. In the Czech Republic, users prefer Google (84%), but local search engine Seznam’s 7.7% share is a strong showing compared to the second place search engines in other countries. 

^{Overall search engine market share in 2025, Czech Republic}

For traffic from “desktop” systems aggregated globally, Google’s market share drops to about 80%, while Bing’s jumps to nearly 11%. This is likely driven by the continued market dominance of Windows-based systems: On Windows, Google refers just 76% of traffic, while Bing refers about 14%. For traffic from mobile devices, Google holds almost 93% of market share, with the same share seen for traffic from both Android and iOS devices.

^{Overall search engine market share in 2025, Windows-based systems}

For additional details, including search engines aggregated under “Other”, please refer to the quarterly Search Engine Referral Reports on Cloudflare Radar.

Chrome remains the top browser across platforms and operating systems – except on iOS, where Safari has the largest share

Cloudflare is also in a unique position to measure browser market share, and we have been publishing quarterly reports on the topic for several years. To identify the browser and associated operating system making content requests, we use information from the User-Agent and Client Hints HTTP headers. We present browser market share data as an overall aggregate, as well as broken out by device type and operating system. Note that the shares of browsers available on both desktop and mobile devices, such as Google Chrome or Apple Safari, are presented in aggregate.

Globally, two-thirds of request traffic to Cloudflare came from Chrome in 2025, similar to its share last year. Safari, available exclusively on Apple devices, was the second most-popular browser, with a 15.4% market share. They were followed by Microsoft Edge (7.4%), Mozilla Firefox (3.7%) and Samsung Internet (2.3%). 

^{Overall browser market share in 2025, worldwide}

In Russia, Chrome remains the most popular with a 44% share, but the domestic Yandex Browser comes in a strong second with a 33% market share, as compared to the sub-10% shares for Safari, Edge, and Opera. Interestingly, the Yandex Browser actually beat Chrome by a percentage point (39% to 38%) in June before giving up significant market share to Chrome as the year progressed.

^{Overall browser market share in 2025, Russia}

As the default browser on iOS, Safari is far and away the most popular on such devices, with a 79% market share, four times Chrome’s 19% share. Less than 1% of requests come from DuckDuckGo, Firefox, and QQ Browser (developed in China by Tencent). In contrast, on Android, 85% of requests are from Chrome, while vendor-provided Samsung Internet is a distant second with a 6.6% share. Huawei Browser, another vendor-provided browser, is third at just 1%. And despite being the default browser on Windows, Edge’s 19% share pales in comparison to Chrome, which leads with a 69% share on that operating system.

^{Overall browser market share in 2025, iOS devices}

For additional details, including browsers aggregated under “Other”, please refer to the quarterly Browser Market Share Reports on Cloudflare Radar.

Connectivity

Almost half of the 174 major Internet outages observed around the world in 2025 were due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of Internet connectivity

Internet outages continue to be an ever-present threat, and the potential impact of these outages continues to grow, as they can lead to economic losses, disrupted educational and government services, and limited communications. During 2025, we covered significant Internet disruptions and their associated causes in our quarterly summary posts (Q1, Q2, Q3) as well standalone posts covering major outages in Portugal & Spain and Afghanistan. The Cloudflare Radar Outage Center tracks these Internet outages, and uses Cloudflare traffic data for insights into their scope and duration.

Nearly half of the observed outages this year were related to Internet shutdowns intended to prevent cheating on academic exams. Countries including Iraq, Syria, and Sudan again implemented regular multi-hour shutdowns over the course of several weeks during exam periods. Other government-directed shutdowns in Libya and Tanzania were implemented in response to protests and civil unrest, while in Afghanistan, the Taliban ordered the shutdown of fiber optic Internet connectivity in multiple provinces as part of a drive to “prevent immorality.”

Cable cuts, affecting both submarine and domestic fiber optic infrastructure, were also a leading cause of Internet disruptions in 2025. These cuts resulted in network providers in countries/regions including the United States, South Africa, Haiti, Pakistan, and Hong Kong experiencing service disruptions lasting from several hours to several days. Other notable outages include one caused by a fire in a telecom building in Cairo, Egypt, which disrupted Internet connectivity across multiple service providers for several days, and another in Jamaica, where damage caused by Hurricane Melissa resulted in lower Internet traffic from the island for over a week.

Within the timeline on the Year in Review microsite, hovering over a dot will display information about that outage, and clicking on it will link to additional insights.

^{Over 170 major Internet outages were observed around the world during 2025}

Globally, less than a third of dual-stack requests were made over IPv6, while in India, over two-thirds were

Available IPv4 address space has been largely exhausted