"In its 2025 Year in Review, Cloudflare notes that internet traffic worldwide grew by almost a fifth, with the increases coming in fits and starts. In fact, traffic was somewhat flat through mid-April and even experienced a mysterious dip before bouncing back sharply to 5 percent growth during May. Most of the growth occurred after mid-August, however, accelerating rapidly to hit 19 percent by the start of December."
"According to Cloudflare, 43 percent of requests across the interwebs were from mobile devices this year, up from 41 percent in 2024. The balance came from "classic" laptop and desktop type devices. But despite the slight increase, the firm says it believes that mobile device usage has now effectively reached a steady proportion of the traffic. When it comes to the most accessed internet services, Google remains top of the overall list, followed by Facebook, then Apple and Microsoft."
"AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models. In response, Cloudflare called for clear " rules of the road" for AI bot behaviour, such as that companies should publicly disclose information about their AI bots, and that these should have one distinct, openly declared purpose."
Cloudflare reported a 19% increase in global internet traffic during 2025, with growth uneven across the year: flat through mid-April, a dip, a 5% rebound in May, and most growth after mid‑August. Mobile devices generated 43% of requests, up from 41% in 2024, while the remainder came from laptops and desktops and mobile share appears to have stabilized. Google remained the most accessed service overall, followed by Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. OpenAI led AI service access, followed by Anthropic, Perplexity and Gemini. AI bots accounted for 4.2% of HTML request traffic and calls were made for clear disclosure and purpose rules.
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