Global internet usage continued its relentless climb in 2025, increasing by 19% according to Cloudflare’s latest “Radar 2025 Year in Review” report. This growth underscores the deepening integration of the internet into daily life, even as digital divides begin to narrow with solutions like satellite broadband.
The Shifting Digital Landscape
The past year witnessed both the end of an era – the official death of AOL dial-up – and the expansion of connectivity to previously unreachable regions through services like Starlink. This illustrates a key tension: while legacy systems fade, new technologies are pushing access further than ever before.
Cloudflare’s position as a core internet infrastructure provider gives its data unique weight. The company’s own outages this year, impacting major platforms like Spotify and Google, served as a stark reminder of how central it has become.
Key Trends from 2025
The report highlights several critical developments in online behavior:
- AI Bot Traffic: Artificial intelligence crawlers now account for 4.2% of all HTML requests, signaling a growing reliance on automated web scraping and analysis. This figure is likely to rise as AI models demand more data for training and operation.
- Seasonal Traffic Patterns: Internet activity remained relatively flat in the first half of the year before spiking in the latter half. This aligns with post-holiday normalization, suggesting predictable patterns in online engagement.
- Google’s Dominance: Despite competition from OpenAI, Google remains the most dominant internet service, with Chrome as the leading browser and GoogleBot as the highest traffic verified bot. This reinforces Google’s enduring control over search, infrastructure, and user access.
- Android vs. iOS: Android devices continue to drive the majority of online traffic (65% globally), though iOS maintains a strong presence in regions like the United States (56% of mobile traffic). This reflects platform preferences and economic disparities.
- Starlink’s Expansion: Elon Musk’s Starlink experienced a 2.3x growth rate in 2025, reaching a milestone with its 10,000th satellite launch. This demonstrates the disruptive potential of satellite internet in bridging connectivity gaps.
- ChatGPT Leads AI Services: ChatGPT emerged as the most popular AI service, outperforming Google Gemini, Claude/Anthropic, and Perplexity. This highlights OpenAI’s early lead in the consumer AI market, despite competition.
Implications and Future Outlook
These trends suggest an increasingly automated, centralized, and interconnected digital world. The rise of AI bots poses questions about data privacy and the authenticity of online interactions, while Google’s continued dominance raises concerns about market concentration. Starlink’s growth demonstrates the potential for decentralized connectivity, but also introduces new dependencies on private space infrastructure.
“Continued global Internet traffic growth reflects our ongoing reliance on digital services,” Cloudflare states, confirming the trend toward greater online dependence.
The 2025 data illustrates that the internet is not merely growing – it’s evolving in ways that will shape how we interact with technology for years to come.
