The global Internet has grown by 19 percent this year. That’s according to Cloudflare, which recently released its “Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review” report, a year-long look back at online behavior.
With more people spending more time online than ever before, we are starting to see some cracks in the digital divide. This was the year that AOL dial-up internet officially died (RIP), but it was also the year that satellite companies like Starlink brought internet to some of the farthest corners of the Earth.
The report also includes statistics showing the state of the web in 2025. Cloudflare offers a wide range of internet services, and is one of the main pillars that build the internet infrastructure. The world was reminded of that this year when the Cloudflare outage led to downtime and errors on many popular websites and apps, such as Spotify, Google, Snapchat, Discord, and Nintendo.
Cloudflare also acts as a traffic gatekeeper for many types of websites, making the company uniquely suited to predict the state of the Internet.
You can check out the entire report for yourself, but here are some of the 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 possible, many websites are reporting spikes in bot activity. And Cloudflare Radar’s report proves this: AI bots now account for 4.2 percent of all HTML requests, the company says.
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Internet traffic increased significantly in the second half of the year
“Our continued reliance on the Internet is reflected in the continued growth of the Internet around the world,” Cloudflare said. “This style line begins in mid-January, allowing online work to normalize following the return to work and school after the new year.”
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The company’s statistics show that traffic grows slowly and remains low from January to July, then increases in the latter half of the year.
Google is still the king of the internet
Google is currently partnering with OpenAI for the future of AI – but according to internet users, it remains unmatched.
According to Cloudflare, Google is the most popular internet service in the world, followed by Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. ChatGPT failed out of 10.
Google also offers the “highest traffic guaranteed Bot” (GoogleBot), the top search engine, and the most used web browser (Chrome).
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Android is still more popular than iOS
Cloudflare found that Android devices account for 65 percent of internet traffic, while iOS traffic makes up the rest.
The company notes that this varies greatly by region, with iOS adoption reaching 70 percent in some areas. In the United States, iOS accounts for 56 percent of mobile traffic.
Starlink helps the Internet grow
Love Elon Musk or hate him, there’s no denying that his Starlink service has played a huge role in the growth of the internet this year.
Starlink saw a 2.3x growth rate over the past year, and that remained stable throughout. This year, Starlink and SpaceX hit a milestone – launching their 10,000th satellite.
ChatGPT is an advanced AI service
The report found that ChatGPT is the most popular AI service (as opposed to an online service), which may not be surprising. What was the surprise? Despite recent improvements with Gemini 3, Google Gemini is only ranked fourth, with Claude/Anthropic and Perplexity both surpassing it.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringes Ziff Davis’ copyrights in training and using its AI programs.
