Global internet traffic grew 19 percent this year. That’s according to Cloudflare, which just released its “Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review” report, a look-back on the year in online behavior.
As more and more humans are spending more and more time online than ever before, we’re starting to see some cracks in the digital divide. This was the year that AOL dial-up internet officially died (RIP), but also a year in which satellite companies like Starlink brought the internet to some of the most remote corners of Earth.
The report also includes some revealing statistics on the state of the web in 2025. Cloudflare provides a broad range of internet services, and it’s one of the core pillars that make up the infrastructure of the internet. The world was reminded of that this year when a Cloudflare outage led to downtime and errors for many popular websites and apps, such as Spotify, Google, Snapchat, Discord, and Nintendo.
Cloudflare also acts as a traffic gatekeeper of sorts for many websites, which also makes the company uniquely qualified to prognosticate about the state of the online world.
You can check out the entire report for yourself, but here are some key takeaways that stuck with us.
AI bots account for a lot of traffic
As AI companies send out crawlers and bots to scrape as much of the internet as they can, many websites are reporting spikes in bot activity. And the Cloudflare Radar report bears this out: AI bots now account for 4.2 percent of all HTML requests, the company says.
Internet traffic primarily grew in the second half of the year
“Our ongoing reliance on the Internet is reflected in continued global Internet traffic growth,” Cloudflare says. “This trend line starts mid-January, allowing for Internet activity to normalize following the return to work and school after the