Cloudflare 2026 Internet Report Reveals Massive AI Bot Growth and Record DDoS Attacks

Cloudflare has published its 2025 Radar Year in Review, offering a detailed look at how global internet traffic, AI automation, encryption, and cyberattacks evolved over the past year. The data highlights an internet that continues to grow rapidly while facing mounting security and infrastructure challenges.

Global internet traffic continued to grow in 2025

According to Cloudflare, overall internet traffic increased by roughly 19% in 2025. Usage rose steadily throughout the year and accelerated during the later months, reflecting sustained global demand for online services.

This growth places additional pressure on infrastructure providers. Higher traffic volumes raise operational costs while increasing the potential impact of outages, misconfigurations, or large-scale attacks.

ChatGPT leads AI usage, but competition has intensified

When Cloudflare analyzed traffic to generative AI platforms, ChatGPT remained the most widely used service by a large margin. However, several competitors gained visibility during 2025.

Perplexity, Claude, and GitHub Copilot increased their share, while newer entrants such as Google Gemini, Windsurf AI, Grok, and DeepSeek appeared among the top ten AI services for the first time. The data shows a rapidly diversifying AI ecosystem rather than reliance on a single platform.

AI crawler traffic surged across the web

AI-related crawling activity expanded significantly. Googlebot alone accounted for about 4.5% of all HTML requests served by Cloudflare-protected websites. Other AI crawlers combined generated an additional 4.2% of requests.

Cloudflare observed increased crawling linked to search indexing and AI model training from tools including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, Windsurf AI, Grok, and DeepSeek.

Websites reacted differently to this surge. Many site owners fully blocked AI crawler user agents such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot using robots.txt files. In contrast, search crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot usually faced partial restrictions, limited to specific directories rather than entire domains.

Encryption adoption and cyberattacks both hit new highs

Post-quantum encryption adoption rose sharply in 2025. Encrypted traffic increased from 29% to 52% of all human-generated web traffic, signaling a major shift toward stronger security standards.

At the same time, attacks intensified. Cloudflare mitigated malicious activity across roughly 6.2% of global traffic, and the company recorded its largest DDoS attacks to date, with peaks reaching 31.4 Tbps late in the year.

Email abuse also persisted, with about 5.6% of analyzed emails flagged as malicious, often tied to specific top-level domains.

Overall, Cloudflare’s report depicts an internet that continues to expand, becomes increasingly automated by AI, adopts stronger encryption, and faces higher volumes of abuse and large-scale attacks. For the full report, read Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review.

Speaking of threats, Cloudflare’s CEO apologized for the outage that happened last month.

Via Beta News