Global internet traffic increased by 19% in 2025, according to Cloudflare’s newly released Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review report, highlighting continued growth in how much time people spend online worldwide. Cloudflare said traffic growth was especially pronounced in the second half of the year, following a normalization period after work and school resumed in January.
The report reflects a year of major transitions in global connectivity. While 2025 marked the official end of AOL dial-up internet, satellite services such as Starlink expanded broadband access to remote regions, helping narrow — but not eliminate — the digital divide. Cloudflare noted that these shifts underscore both the progress and ongoing challenges in global internet accessibility.
As a core infrastructure provider, Cloudflare plays a critical role in internet performance and security, a fact highlighted earlier this year when a Cloudflare outage disrupted services across major platforms including Google, Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Nintendo. The incident reinforced how dependent modern digital services are on a small number of backbone providers.
One of the most notable trends in the report is the growing impact of artificial intelligence on web traffic. Cloudflare revealed that AI bots now account for 4.2% of all HTML requests, driven by large-scale web crawling as AI companies gather data to train and operate models. This surge has contributed to noticeable increases in automated traffic across many websites.
Overall, Cloudflare said the continued rise in global internet usage reflects deeper reliance on digital services for work, entertainment, communication, and AI-driven applications, signalling further pressure on infrastructure, security, and governance as online activity continues to scale.
