As more and more humans are spending more time online than ever before, we are starting to see some cracks in the digital divide. This was the year that AOL dial-up Internet officially ended (RIP), but it was also the year that satellite companies like Starlink brought Internet to some of the most remote corners of the Earth.
The report also includes some revealing statistics on the state of the web in 2025. Cloudflare provides a wide range of Internet services, and is one of the main pillars that make up the Internet infrastructure. The world was reminded of this this year when a Cloudflare outage caused downtime and errors for many popular websites and apps like Spotify, Google, Snapchat, Discord, and Nintendo.
Cloudflare also acts as a kind of traffic gatekeeper for many websites, making the company uniquely qualified to make predictions about the state of the online world.
You can check out the full report yourself, but here are some of the highlights that stuck with us.
A lot of traffic comes due to AI bots
As AI companies send crawlers and bots to scour as much of the Internet as possible, many websites are reporting an increase in bot activity. And the Cloudflare Radar report reveals this: The company says AI bots now account for 4.2 percent of all HTML requests.
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Internet traffic grew mainly in the second half of the year
“Our continued dependence on the Internet is reflected in continued global Internet traffic growth,” Cloudflare says. “This trend line begins in mid-January, allowing Internet activity to return to normal following the return to work and school after the New Year.”
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Company data shows traffic increasing slowly and remaining steady from January to July, then increasing in the latter half of the year.
Google is still the king of the Internet
Google is currently competing with OpenAI on the future of AI – but in terms of internet users, it is unmatched.
According to Cloudflare, Google is the most popular internet service in the world, followed by Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. ChatGPT could not even make it to the top 10.
Google also offers the “highest traffic verified bot” (GoogleBot), the top search engine, and the most used web browser (Chrome).
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Android is still more popular than iOS
Cloudflare found that Android devices account for 65 percent of online traffic, with iOS traffic making up the remainder.
The company notes that this varies widely by region, with iOS adoption rates reaching 70 percent in some areas. In the United States, iOS accounts for 56 percent of mobile traffic.
Starlink is helping the Internet grow
Love Elon Musk or hate him, it cannot be denied that his Starlink service has played a huge role in the development of the Internet this year.
Starlink saw a 2.3x growth rate in the last year, and it remained fairly stable throughout. This year, Starlink and SpaceX recorded a major milestone – they launched their 10,000th satellite.
ChatGPT is the top AI service
The report found that ChatGPT is the most popular AI service (as opposed to an Internet service), which may come as no surprise. What was the surprise? Despite recent progress with Gemini 3, Google Gemini is only in fourth place, overtaken by both Cloud/Anthropic and Perplexity.
Disclosure: Mashable’s parent company Ziff Davis filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.
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