The Internet Rewired: Cloudflare 2025 Review Unveils the AI Bot War and a 19% Traffic Surge

According to Cloudflare, its sixth annual Year in Review shows global internet traffic rose by 19% year over year in 2025 and an intense AI bot war has erupted across the web. The report notes that Cloudflare mitigated more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks this year. It also highlights that Google’s web crawlers vastly outpace rivals and are the single largest source of automated internet traffic worldwide.

The analysis reveals that 52% of all human-generated internet traffic is now protected by post-quantum cryptography, meaning more than half of global data transmissions are hardened against emerging risks. The study also observes that civil society organisations and non-profits became the most frequently targeted sector for the first time, reflecting increased cybercrime pressures on data-rich, vulnerable targets. As a snapshot of 2025, the findings describe an internet characterised by rapid AI-driven expansion alongside growing fragility.