As we summarize the year 2025, Cloudflare’s annual report reviews the major trends in the internet ecosystem. This report details the core trends that shook the internet environment this year, including the growth of AI bots, the widespread adoption of post-quantum cryptography, and the largest DDoS attack in history.
Cloudflare's "Radar Annual Report" analyzes internet traffic and anomalies in areas such as security, connectivity, and AI activities on its global network each year. This year, based on data centers spread across 330 cities and traffic data processing over 81 million HTTP requests per second, trends have been organized.
In 2025, global internet traffic is expected to grow by 19% compared to the previous year, reflecting a deepening reliance on digital resources. Some regions are experiencing astonishing growth, such as Botswana, where traffic surged nearly 300% compared to the previous year. On the other hand, real-world chaos has also had a direct impact on internet traffic, such as election-related network blocks in Tanzania and outages in Jamaica caused by Hurricane Melissa.
Starlink's significant role in expanding global connectivity is also a major topic. Elon Musk's satellite internet service, Starlink, doubled its traffic scale this year and officially began operations in over 20 new countries.
Notably, there has been a surge in AI bot traffic. In particular, Google's 'Googlebot' accounted for over 25% of all authenticated bot traffic, recording an overwhelming share. Among all HTML requests, AI bots account for 4.2%, close to Googlebot's 4.5%. OpenAI's GPTbot is far behind Googlebot in terms of content access. The growth of 'user behavior crawling'—where content is collected by AI based on user requests—has increased by more than 15 times, which analysts believe is closely related to the widespread use of ChatGPT.
In terms of security, some mixed signals have been detected. Cloudflare mitigated 6.2% of all internet traffic through its security systems, with 3.3% being blocked due to violations of DDoS or Web Application Firewall rules. Notably, the large-scale 'overcapacity DDoS' attack activity that occurred in July of this year had a significant impact on global threat mitigation metrics. Non-profit organizations, civic groups, and religious institutions have been identified as the most attacked sectors, with spear-phishing and social media-based fraudulent links remaining major threats.
There are also positive changes. 52% of human-driven traffic is protected by post-quantum cryptography, indicating a significant shift in encryption technology. This reflects the result of institutional efforts across the ecosystem to upgrade the default applications using hybrid quantum-safe transport layer security through the iPhone operating system iOS.
In terms of connectivity, a total of 174 major internet outage incidents have been reported, nearly half of which were government-level blocking measures under the pretext of preventing exam cheating. Europe maintained the highest levels of connectivity quality, and India achieved a 67% IPv6 adoption rate, firmly holding the world-leading position. Today, in 117 countries, traffic generated through mobile devices accounts for more than half of the total traffic, and mobile-first access methods have become a global trend.
Cloudflare's analysis in this report points out: 'Although the internet and networks continue to evolve, some core metrics are gradually stabilizing,' while 'especially AI-related metrics may undergo dramatic changes in the coming years due to the pace of technological and demand shifts.' The structural changes in the internet environment connected to AI warrant attention regarding how they will manifest in the future.
