Google and ChatGPT Remain the Most Popular Services as Internet Traffic Grows by 19 Percent: Cloudflare

Cloudflare published its 2025 Internet activity report this week, revealing several interesting insights and developments. The San Francisco-based web infrastructure company found that overall Internet traffic increased by 19 percent this year, with most of the growth coming in the second half of the year. The report also stated that artificial intelligence (AI) bot activity has increased, with 4.2 percent of the HTML requests now being sent from non-human sources. Additionally, the connectivity cloud platform found that Google continues to be the most popular destination online.

Cloudflare Says Google and ChatGPT Dominate Internet Traffic

The Cloudflare report, titled “2025 Year in Review,” shared Internet patterns and key trends this year. One important revelation was that the global Internet traffic grew by 19 percent in 2025; however, the growth was not spread out equally. The report said that traffic growth remained mostly flat in the first half, then picked up quickly starting in August. The observation also matches real-world patterns, as students are returning to school in August, and companies also plan out their targets for the rest of the year.

Among the best performers of the year, Google remained the most visited domain online, highlighting its influential force on the web. The company's domination in the search engine space was also visible as Google Search remains the single largest referrer of human web traffic globally.

Additionally, technologies owned by the Mountain View-based tech giant, such as Chrome, Android, and Googlebot, also remained high on both user access and automated web crawling. Cloudflare's data shows that Googlebot remains the most active crawler on the Internet by a wide margin, reflecting how search indexing and AI-driven retrieval are becoming tightly intertwined.

Google was followed by Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram to complete the top five most popular Internet services. From the sixth to the 10th position was taken by AWS, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, and WhatsApp. In the generative AI space, OpenAI continues to hold its top spot. The OpenAI chatbot was followed by Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, Google's Gemini, and Character.AI to round off the top five spots.

Cloudflare's report also weighs in on the increasing influence of AI on the Internet and its consequences. The report stated that crawl volume from Googlebot (which is used for both Gemini and direct user requests) was the highest. Additionally, user-driven (based on a text prompt) AI bot crawling grew by 15X in 2025.

One interesting insight was that Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratio among all the leading AI and search platforms, reaching 5,00,000:1. The metric measures the ratio between how often a crawler bot visits a website and how many humans visit the same website based on the referral from the bot's web scraping. This extreme imbalance highlights that most Anthropic users were not visiting the cited links. Such trends often indicate that the platform is more focused on providing the answer in a way that makes the citations irrelevant, and it leads to a loss of monetisation for the content website.

The best crawl-to-refer ratio performer in the AI space this year was Perplexity, swinging between 100:1 and 700:1 across the 12 months. Overall, DuckDuckGo performed the best in this metric, staying between 1:1 and 1.5:1 through the year. Google, on the other hand, started the year at 3:1, reached 30:1 in April, and ended the year under 10:1.