AI Reshapes the Internet as Traffic Jumps 19%, Cloudflare Finds

Cloudflare, Inc.  has published its sixth annual Year in Review, offering one of the most comprehensive snapshots of how the Internet evolved in 2025. The report analyzes global Internet traffic, usage patterns, and security trends, drawing on data from Cloudflare’s vast global network and its Cloudflare Radar platform.

According to the report, global Internet traffic grew by 19 percent year-on-year, reflecting society’s increasing dependence on digital connectivity for both personal and professional activities. A major shift observed in 2025 was the rapid transition from large-scale AI model training to continuous AI inference, alongside broader advancements in artificial intelligence capabilities across the Internet.

Security milestones also defined the year. Post-quantum encryption now protects 52 percent of all human Internet traffic, helping safeguard users against future quantum-based threats. However, this progress was matched by escalating cyber risks, as Cloudflare recorded more than 25 record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, underscoring the intensifying scale of cyber warfare.

Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said the Internet is undergoing a fundamental transformation, driven by AI innovation and increasingly sophisticated threat actors. He noted that while 2025 marked several important milestones, it also exposed challenges facing online content creation and security at unprecedented scale, reinforcing Cloudflare’s responsibility to help build a safer and more resilient Internet.

The report highlights several key trends from 2025. Google and Meta retained their positions as the world’s most popular Internet services for the fourth consecutive year, while ChatGPT remained the leading platform in the fast-growing generative AI category. In automated traffic, Google’s crawling bot emerged as the single dominant AI bot, far surpassing all others.

Cybercriminal behavior also shifted, with civil society and non-profit organizations becoming the most targeted sector for the first time, likely due to the sensitivity and potential value of their data. On the infrastructure side, government actions accounted for nearly half of all major Internet outages worldwide, even as disruptions from cable cuts declined sharply and those linked to power failures increased.

In terms of connectivity performance, Europe led the world in Internet speed and quality, with several countries recording average download speeds above 200 Mbps. Spain ranked highest globally for overall Internet quality.

The findings are based on aggregated and anonymized data from Cloudflare Radar, powered by Cloudflare’s global network spanning more than 330 cities in over 120 countries, as well as insights from its widely used 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver.

Cloudflare said the Year in Review aims to help governments, businesses, and users better understand the evolving Internet landscape, improve resilience, and strengthen security as digital reliance continues to grow worldwide.