Cloudflare has recently published the sixth edition of its Radar Year in Review. The results reveal 19% yearly growth in global internet traffic, Googlebot dominance, increasing crawl-to-refer ratios, and broad adoption of post-quantum encryption. Over 20% of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients, almost doubling adoption over the previous year.
Cloudflare has recently published the sixth edition of its Radar Year in Review. The results reveal 19% yearly growth in global internet traffic, Googlebot dominance, increasing crawl-to-refer ratios, and broad adoption of post-quantum encryption. Over 20% of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients, almost doubling adoption over the previous year.
Leveraging data from the widespread Cloudflare infrastructure, including anonymized query data for traffic to the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, the yearly report analyzes the disruptions, advances, and metrics that defined the Internet in 2025. The review is organized into different sections (traffic, AI, adoption & usage, connectivity, security, and email security) and uses the same methodologies as previous years.
With global traffic growing 19% during the year and Google and Facebook still the most popular services, the report highlights significant growth for Starlink, up 2.3x year-over-year.
Using a Hilbert curve to visualize a sequence of IPv4 addresses in a two-dimensional pattern that keeps nearby IP addresses close together, the analysis finds that the Googlebot web crawler is the most popular. David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare, writes:
Googlebot was again responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2025 as it crawled millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing and AI training.
Furthermore, Googlebot was responsible for over 28% of traffic from verified bots, with Google AdsBot (used to monitor sites where Google ads are served), Google Image Proxy (used to retrieve and cache images embedded in email messages), and GoogleOther further increasing the dominance of the search company.
