The Internet plays a central role in both our personal and professional lives, and this year marked a notable shift in how much society depends on it – driven by significant growth and major technological changes.
The winners and trendsetters have once again been identified in Cloudflare, Inc.’s sixth annual Year in Review. The report – accompanied by a spotlight on the most popular Internet services – highlights the most significant Internet trends, traffic patterns, and security insights from the past year.
Global Internet traffic ballooned by 19% year-over-year, and we saw substantial changes and advanced capabilities introduced to AI. At the same time, there were major milestones in security: post-quantum encryption now secures 52% of all human traffic to ensure Internet users are protected from future threats. However, this growth also brought challenges, with a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare leading to more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks.
The major highlights of 2025 reveal that Google and Facebook (now Meta) locked in their positions as the two most popular Internet services globally for the fourth consecutive year, while ChatGPT held onto the number one spot in the booming Generative AI category. However, Google gained another crown as its crawling bot dwarfed activity from all other leading AI bots, making it the single biggest source of automated Internet traffic. Cybercrime continues to concern, with new targets identified. For the first time, civil society and non-profit organisations became the most attacked sector, likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data.
“From AI to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different. While we celebrated several Internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what ‘scale’ means and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges,” says Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare.
