As it concludes 2025, Cloudflare's annual report reviews key trends in the internet ecosystem. This report details the core trends that have shaken up the internet landscape this year, including the growth of AI bots, the widespread adoption of post-quantum cryptography, and the largest DDoS attack in history.
Cloudflare analyzes internet traffic and anomalies across its global network in areas such as security, connectivity, and AI activity every year through its "Radar Annual Report." This year, trends were compiled based on traffic data from data centers in 330 cities, processing over 81 million HTTP requests per second.
Global internet traffic is projected to grow by 19% in 2025 compared to the previous year, reflecting a deepening dependence on digital technology. Some regions are experiencing dramatic growth, such as Botswana, where traffic surged by nearly 300% year-on-year. On the other hand, real-world disruptions have also directly impacted internet traffic, such as election-related internet censorship in Tanzania and outages in Jamaica caused by Hurricane Melissa.
Starlink's significant role in expanding global connectivity is also a major topic. Elon Musk's satellite internet service, Starlink, has doubled its traffic this year and officially launched in more than 20 new countries.
The surge in AI bot traffic is particularly noteworthy. Google's "Googlebot," in particular, accounted for over 25% of all certified bot traffic, a dominant share. AI bots accounted for 4.2% of all HTML requests, close to Googlebot's 4.5%. OpenAI's GPTbot lagged far behind Googlebot in content access. "User behavior crawling," which involves AI collecting content based on user requests, increased more than 15-fold, which analysts believe is closely related to the widespread adoption of ChatGPT.
On the security front, some mixed signals were detected. Cloudflare mitigated 6.2% of all internet traffic through its security systems, with 3.3% blocked due to violations of DDoS or web application firewall rules. The massive "hypercapacity DDoS" attack campaign in July, in particular, had a significant impact on global threat mitigation metrics. Nonprofit organizations, civic groups, and religious institutions were identified as the most frequently attacked sectors, while spear-phishing and fraudulent links based on social media remained major threats.
There have also been positive changes. 52% of human-driven traffic is now protected by post-quantum cryptography, marking a significant shift in encryption technology. This reflects the results of the hybrid quantum-secure transport layer security being applied by default in upgrades to the iPhone's iOS operating system, as well as institutional efforts across the entire ecosystem.
Regarding connectivity, 174 large-scale internet outages were reported, nearly half of which were government-level blocking measures ostensibly to prevent exam cheating. Europe maintained the highest level of connectivity quality, while India achieved a 67% IPv6 adoption rate, firmly holding a leading position globally. Currently, in 117 countries, mobile devices account for more than half of all traffic, making mobile-first access a global trend.
In this report, Cloudflare points out that "despite the continuous evolution of the internet and networks, some core metrics are gradually stabilizing," while "especially AI-related metrics, which are highly likely to undergo dramatic changes in the coming years, depending on the speed of technological and demand shifts." How these structural changes in the AI-connected internet environment will become a reality in the future is a matter of considerable interest.
