The Engineer's tl;dr: Top Internet Trends from Cloudflare's Report

For me, the highlights significant shifts in global internet traffic, particularly driven by AI integration, massive security threats, and the rapid adoption of post-quantum cryptography.

Global Traffic and Scale

The internet continued its relentless expansion in 2025, with global traffic growing by 19%, a notable acceleration compared to the previous year.

Peak Throughput: Cloudflare’s network handles an average of 81 million requests per second (RPS), peaking at 129 million RPS. This scale (approx. 7–11 trillion daily requests) offers a massive dataset for these insights.
Starlink Surge: Traffic from Starlink’s autonomous system (AS14593) more than doubled (2.3x) year-over-year, telling us that it is expanding rapidly.
Outages: Nearly half of the 174 major observed internet outages were government-directed shutdowns, often tied to exams or political events. (of course they wanted to left-shift the blame 😛)

The AI Crawler Landscape

2025 was defined by the explosion of AI-driven interactions, specifically "user action" crawling... bots that fetch real-time data in response to user queries (e.g., from a chatbot).

User Action Spikes: This specific type of "on-demand" AI crawling increased by over 15x throughout the year.
Bot Dominance: Googlebot remains the undisputed heavyweight, accounting for 4.5% of all HTML request traffic (used for both search indexing and AI training). All other AI bots combined accounted for roughly 4.2% showing the massive lead.
API Automation: In a stat relevant to backend systems, one-fifth of all automated API requests were initiated by Go-based clients, highlighting the language's dominance in modern microservices and tooling - a stark contrast from what I would have guessed (Python).

Security and Encryption

The threat landscape saw hyper-volumetric attacks reach new heights, while defensive infrastructure has already started shifting dramatically toward quantum resistance. (if you haven't read about why security is worried about the eventual quantum leap, you need to step out of the rock!!!)

Record DDoS: The largest attacks of the year peaked at a staggering 31.4 Tbps, a significant jump in volumetric intensity. Overall, 6.2% of global traffic was mitigated as malicious or restricted. (429s FTW!!)
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC): In a massive infrastructure shift, the share of human-generated web traffic using Post-Quantum Encrypted TLS 1.3 grew from 29% to 52% by December. This was largely driven by OS-level updates (browsers and mobile OSs) enabling PQC by default. (go read!!)

Protocol and Browser Trends

Despite the hype around newer protocols, the infrastructure mix remained remarkably stable in 2025.

Protocol Stagnation: HTTP/3 adoption hovered around 21%, while HTTP/2 maintained dominance at 50%. This suggests that while QUIC/HTTP/3 is mature, the migration cost or inertia for many legacy backends remains high.
Browser Share: Chrome continues to drive nearly two-thirds of all request traffic globally. However, on iOS devices, Safari retains the majority share.