Overview
- Global internet traffic rose 19% in 2025, with growth flat early in the year before accelerating after mid‑August to reach the year’s peak by December.
- AI automation became a major share of web activity: Googlebot accounted for 4.5% of HTML requests and reached 11.6% of sampled pages, while non‑Google AI bots averaged 4.2% of HTML requests.
- User‑action crawling tied to chatbot queries expanded rapidly across 2025, rising more than fifteenfold and following clear work‑ and school‑week patterns.
- Publishers increasingly restricted AI‑only bots via robots.txt as OpenAI’s GPTBot was most blocked, whereas Googlebot remained the most allowed due to its link to search visibility.
- Connectivity and security shifted in tandem: Starlink traffic climbed roughly 2.3x across more than 20 new markets, nearly half of 174 major outages were government‑directed, over 25 record DDoS attacks were recorded, and post‑quantum encryption protected 52% of human traffic to Cloudflare.