In 2025, the Internet has evolved into a paradox—a vast, pulsating network that is simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than at any previous point in its history. What was once a relatively simple exchange of human communication has now become an ecosystem dominated by artificial intelligence, automated agents, and machine-driven interactions that are reconfiguring the very structure of connectivity itself. According to Cloudflare, one of the most recognized content delivery networks in the world, global Internet traffic surged by nearly twenty percent over the past year. Yet this remarkable expansion is not primarily the work of new human users endlessly scrolling through videos or shopping online—it stems instead from a massive increase in automated requests initiated by bots, crawlers, and artificial intelligence systems. These digital entities, tirelessly probing and collecting data, now account for such a significant portion of activity that they threaten to overwhelm both infrastructure and security defenses.
The repercussions of this shift are profound. AI-powered bots are not simply indexing the open web for traditional search engines; they are systematically extracting vast libraries of text, images, and interactions to fuel the learning processes of large language models. As Cloudflare reported, nearly one-third of all web traffic now originates from these automated visitors. Their insatiable appetite for data generates sudden surges that can overwhelm servers with tens of terabits of information requests—levels comparable to or exceeding many high-grade Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults. In effect, the very technology designed to make digital systems more intelligent is unintentionally adding tremendous strain to their stability. Cloudflare’s leadership has accurately summarized this phenomenon by observing that the Internet is not merely adapting to change but is being fundamentally rewired—each day presenting a new and unpredictable landscape of interactions between human and machine.
Among the most active automated agents, Googlebot continues to hold the lead, trawling millions of websites for both classical search indexing and the ever-expanding training needs of AI algorithms. It accounted for approximately 4.5% of all HyperText Markup Language (HTML) requests through Cloudflare’s protected networks in 2025, touching over 11% of unique web pages in specialized samples centered on artificial intelligence–oriented crawlers. It significantly outpaces competing bots such as OpenAI’s GPTBot and Microsoft’s Bingbot, both of which engage in similar, though smaller-scale, data-collection tasks. Meanwhile, user-driven AI agents—tools that retrieve content in real time in response to chatbot queries or autonomous workflows—have expanded more than fifteenfold within a single year. The distinction between human-initiated search and AI-mediated exploration has become increasingly indistinct; users may find themselves interacting with hybrid systems like Perplexity, which now rivals traditional search experiences by blending conversational and indexing capabilities.
To manage this avalanche of automated traffic, Cloudflare has introduced new defenses specifically designed to identify, throttle, or block overly aggressive bots that risk destabilizing or overexploiting web resources. These solutions are becoming essential for site owners, who face mounting challenges as AI continues to reshape the digital landscape.
The way people access the Internet has also transformed dramatically. In 2025, smartphones have solidified their dominance, representing roughly forty-three percent of all Internet access compared to fifty-seven percent for personal computers. While Apple’s iOS platform maintains supremacy in the United States, globally the Android ecosystem holds a commanding sixty-five percent share of mobile activity, leaving iOS with thirty-five percent. In the world of browsers, Google Chrome remains unrivaled, claiming close to sixty-eight percent of the desktop market and an overwhelming eighty-five percent share of the mobile market. On computers, Microsoft Edge follows distantly at around fourteen percent, with Mozilla Firefox declining steadily to less than seven percent.
In the United States, government analytics mirror these international patterns. Data from the federal Digital Analytics Program show Chrome heading the list of browsers accessing official government sites, at more than sixty-four percent. Safari follows at around twenty-three percent—its position bolstered by the popularity of Apple devices—while Edge and Firefox trail at single-digit market shares.
Interestingly, a new generation of browsers designed with AI integration at their core—such as ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and Dia—has yet to appear in significant traffic statistics. Despite their promise of personalized, intelligent web interactions, persistent concerns over data privacy and security have prevented their widespread adoption.
As for where we navigate once online, the hierarchy remains largely predictable. The most visited websites globally continue to be dominated by long-standing giants—Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram—while in the AI sector, ChatGPT leads the way, closely followed by Claude from Anthropic and Perplexity. Microsoft’s Copilot occupies the sixth position, despite the company’s attempt to embed it into nearly every facet of its software ecosystem. Social networks continue to attract immense audiences, with Facebook retaining the top spot and LinkedIn unexpectedly emerging within the top five, surpassing Twitter (now X). In streaming video, YouTube’s supremacy remains unchallenged, followed by Netflix, Twitch, Roku, and Disney+.
Performance-wise, Internet speeds have improved substantially across most regions. Yet interestingly, major technology centers like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States no longer rank among the top twenty in average broadband speed. Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Chile, and South Korea lead the field, boasting average download rates ranging from 260 to 318 megabits per second. On fixed broadband tests, the U.S. performs somewhat better, ranking eighth globally, while Canada places seventeenth and the U.K. forty-third. In mobile performance, the United States again ranks eighth, with median speeds around 279 Mbps, well ahead of Canada’s 140 Mbps and the United Kingdom’s 125 Mbps.
Parallel to these terrestrial networks, satellite-based Internet has transitioned from a niche innovation to a pillar of mainstream connectivity. Cloudflare identified that traffic from Starlink doubled over the course of 2025, growing more than twofold as new service coverage extended to over twenty additional countries and regions. This rapid deployment has brought high-speed broadband to rural and previously disconnected areas, where traditional wired infrastructure remains sparse. The surge in satellite usage is visible in Cloudflare’s global traffic maps, which now show emerging clusters of activity in formerly quiet regions. Meanwhile, minor disruptions have occurred as ground-based Internet providers recalibrate their systems to accommodate the unique routing patterns of satellite connections. Beyond SpaceX’s constellation, Amazon’s upcoming Project Leo—comprising more than 3,200 low Earth orbit satellites—promises to introduce new competition and further expand access as it moves toward early commercial service in the following year.
Security, too, has entered a new epoch. More than half of all human-generated web traffic now uses post-quantum–encryption protocols via TLS 1.3 connections, a dramatic rise from less than thirty percent at the beginning of the year. This shift has been spurred by widespread mobile operating system updates enabling quantum-resistant key exchange by default. What this means, in practice, is that Internet sessions between users and websites are now increasingly shielded against theoretical decryption by future quantum computers. Cloudflare identifies this transition as a milestone: a symbolic and technical threshold signifying that most of humanity’s daily browsing is, at least at the handshake level, ready for the quantum era. In parallel, adoption of the newer HTTP/3 standard continues to grow, now representing roughly one-fifth of all global Internet requests, while its predecessor HTTP/2 remains dominant but continues to cede ground gradually.
Yet these advances coexist with escalating threats. The Internet of 2025 is a busier, yet more brittle, environment—one plagued by incessant waves of malicious activity. Cloudflare found that approximately six percent of all traffic on its network required intervention to mitigate suspected attacks or violations. Sophisticated DDoS onslaughts have become frighteningly routine, with “hyper-volumetric” floods capable of saturating network capacity many times over. The Aisuru botnet, for example, harnessed more than one million compromised devices to launch assaults exceeding one terabit per second—a bandwidth so immense that even users not directly targeted often experience slowdowns as adjacent network segments are overwhelmed.
Compounding the issue, outages and deliberate Internet shutdowns left visible traces in global traffic patterns throughout the year. Nearly half of these disruptions, according to Cloudflare’s analysis, stemmed from government-imposed restrictions aimed at quelling domestic unrest or controlling the flow of information. Other interruptions were caused by physical infrastructure failures, routing misconfigurations, natural disasters, and the occasional, large-scale outages of major service providers. Even giants like Cloudflare itself, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Zoom, and SentinelOne endured significant episodes of downtime that rippled across dependent systems and millions of end users.
The cumulative effect of these incidents underscores an uncomfortable truth: the contemporary Internet, though integral to nearly every form of communication, commerce, and governance, has become deeply centralized and acutely fragile. Each outage exposes how dependent society has grown on a handful of core platforms whose temporary unavailability can stall entire sectors or halt global productivity. A universal failure, lasting even for several days, could paralyze economic activity on a scale difficult to imagine. Thus, while 2025 reveals a network that is undeniably faster, broader, and more sophisticated than ever before, it also exposes a stark vulnerability at the heart of our digital civilization—a reminder that in making the Internet bigger, we may also have made it more brittle.
Sourse: https://www.zdnet.com/article/internet-review-2025-bigger-fragile-hostile-ai-influence-cloudflare/
