With 2025 winding down, cloud connectivity provider Cloudflare Inc. today released its annual year in review, detailing a colorful 12 months of surging artificial intelligence-driven traffic, rapid adoption of post-quantum cryptography and some of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks ever recorded.

The company’s sixth annual Cloudflare Radar Year in Review analyzes internet trends across traffic, security, outages, connectivity and AI activity observed on Cloudflare’s global network, which spans 330 cities and processes more than 81 million HTTP requests per second.

According to the review, 2025 was defined by accelerating digital reliance, widespread crawler activity from major AI platforms and meaningful shifts in how people access and secure the web.

Global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, slightly higher than the 17% growth observed in 2024.

Within the growth figure, there were notable regional swings, such as in Botswana, where traffic increased nearly 300% year-over-year. There were also visible impacts from real-world disruptions such as Tanzania’s government-ordered election shutdowns and outages caused by Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.

Elon Musk’s Starlink is also noted as having played an outsized role in traffic expansion, doubling its global volume and spiking in more than 20 newly connected countries.

To the surprise of no one, AI-driven activity emerged as one of the year’s most defining themes.

Google LLC’s Googlebot dominated all crawlers and generated the highest request volume on Cloudflare’s network, accounting for more than a quarter of all verified bot traffic as it harvested content for both search and AI model training. AI bots overall generated 4.2% of all HTML request traffic, nearly matching Googlebot’s 4.5%.

User-action crawling, where bots visit websites based on questions users ask AI assistants, jumped by more than 15 times, driven largely by the growth in ChatGPT usage across schools and workplaces.

Cloudflare’s visibility analysis also found that Googlebot viewed more content than any other crawler by a huge margin, crawling 11.6% of all sampled pages, triple the rate of OpenAI’s GPTBot.

On the security front, it was a mixed bag, with security trends showing both improvement and escalation.

Cloudflare says 6.2% of all global traffic was mitigated by its systems, with 3.3% blocked as DDoS or web application firewall rule violations. So-called hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks grew significantly, including a major July campaign that heavily skewed global mitigation charts.

Nonprofits, civic groups and religious organizations were found to rank as the most frequently attacked sectors, while deceptive links and identity-based email threats continued to dominate the threat landscape.

In positive news, 2025 also saw a breakthrough milestone in internet encryption, as 52% of human-generated web traffic was found to now be protected by post-quantum cryptography. Cloudflare attributes the rise to ecosystem-wide adoption as well as an update to Apple Inc.’s iOS that enabled hybrid quantum-safe transport layer security by default, causing immediate surges in post-quantum cryptography support in certain regions.

On general online connectivity, the review details 174 major outages through the year, with nearly half traced to government-mandated shutdowns, which were often intended to prevent exam cheating.

European countries topped the charts for connection quality and India maintained its global lead in IPv6 adoption at 67%. Mobile devices now generate the majority of traffic in 117 countries, highlighting a continued shift toward mobile-first internet usage.

“Although the internet and the web continue to evolve and change over time, it appears that some of the key metrics have become fairly stable,” the report concluded. “However, we expect that others, such as those metrics tracking AI trends, will shift over the coming years as that space evolves at a rapid pace.”

Image: Cloudflare