Overview
- Googlebot dominated automated access, accounting for about 4.5% of HTML requests and reaching 11.6% of sampled pages, while non‑Google AI bots averaged 4.2% of HTML requests.
- AI platforms showed wide crawl‑to‑refer gaps as user‑action crawling expanded more than 15–20x, with Anthropic posting extremely high crawl‑to‑refer ratios and Google’s ratios far lower and closer to traditional search behavior.
- Global Internet traffic rose roughly 19% year over year with growth accelerating after mid‑August, and Starlink request volume climbed about 2.3x as service expanded to 20+ new countries.
- Security pressure intensified with more than 25 record‑breaking DDoS attacks, and for the first time civil‑society organizations became the most targeted sector by attack share.
- Connectivity remained fragile as nearly half of 174 major outages were government‑directed shutdowns, while post‑quantum encryption adoption reached 52% of human traffic on Cloudflare’s network.