Azernews.Az

By Alimat Aliyeva

The Cloudflare platform has released its 2025 Internet traffic report, revealing some striking trends. Human activity now accounts for less than half of global web traffic, with non-AI bots generating 47.9% of traffic and AI-powered bots contributing an additional 4.2% of HTML query traffic, Azernews reports.

According to Cloudflare, Googlebot remains the largest single source of bot traffic, used both for search indexing and AI training purposes. Microsoft’s Bingbot performs similar functions but on a smaller scale. Geographically, the United States dominates bot traffic, generating 40% of the total.

Overall, global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, compared to 17% in 2024. Mobile devices accounted for 43% of requests, up from 41% last year. Cloudflare’s security systems blocked or restricted 6.2% of all traffic as potentially malicious, and the company recorded over 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks during the year. Notably, almost half of the observed Internet outages were government-imposed, often to prevent exam cheating or enforce regulations.

In terms of the most visited services, Google remains at the top, followed by Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Among social networks, X dropped to sixth place, behind LinkedIn and Snapchat. In the AI sector, ChatGPT was the most visited service, with Anthropic Claude in second place, ahead of Perplexity and Google Gemini. Elon Musk’s Grok ranked ninth, slightly ahead of China’s DeepSeek.

The year also saw two internal Cloudflare outages, highlighting the fragility of even advanced digital ecosystems. In November, a change in database access rights caused widespread disruptions, and in December, a web firewall adjustment temporarily disabled many websites of large organizations.

Cloudflare’s report also points to structural vulnerabilities in the Internet beyond cyber attacks. One notable issue is the slow adoption of IPv6, designed to solve the IPv4 address shortage. Less than a third of requests from dual-stack devices (supporting both IPv4 and IPv6) use IPv6, as providers continue relying on NAT technology to extend the life of IPv4 infrastructure. While this approach preserves legacy systems, it slows the transition to a more scalable and secure architecture—critical for combating DDoS attacks and the growing presence of AI-training bots.

The report underscores a key trend: the Internet of 2025 is increasingly automated and bot-driven, and its resilience depends not only on cybersecurity but also on technological modernization.