According to Silicon Republic, Cloudflare’s 2025 data shows global internet traffic grew by over 19%, with Google holding the top spot as the world’s most popular service. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram followed. In Ireland specifically, traffic surged 38%, with Google leading followed by Amazon Web Services. The report highlights the “meteoric rise” of generative AI, noting Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini are catching up to ChatGPT, which is nearing 900 million weekly active users. Cloudflare also tracked major outages throughout the year, including its own in November and December that disrupted sites like X, OpenAI, Spotify, Zoom, and LinkedIn, alongside incidents at AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The More Things Change…
Here’s the thing: the top of the internet food chain looks remarkably stable. Google and Facebook? Still there. It’s almost boring, right? But that stability is deceptive. Look at what’s bubbling up right behind them. The real story isn’t who’s on the throne, but who’s storming the castle gates. And that army is made of AI.
The AI Bots Are Coming
The growth of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude isn’t just a product trend—it’s a fundamental shift in how traffic is generated. People aren’t just searching; they’re conversing. They’re not just browsing social feeds; they’re asking AI assistants to do things. This creates a whole new layer of internet activity. And it’s messy. Cloudflare even delisted Perplexity’s crawler as a “verified bot” after it was caught stealth crawling. That’s a tiny preview of the battles to come over data, access, and what constitutes fair use. When the biggest verified bot on the network is Google Bot, crawling for AI training data, you know the landscape has already changed.
A Fragile Foundation
So we have massive growth and exciting new tech. But the 2025 outage data is a huge reality check. It wasn’t just one provider. It was Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure… basically the entire modern internet’s plumbing. When a single point fails, it takes down everything from X to Canva. This year proved that our dependence on a few critical infrastructure providers is a massive vulnerability. For enterprises, it’s a nightmare for reliability. For users, it’s just frustrating. You have to wonder: is the system getting too complex to be stable?
What It All Means
Basically, we’re in a transition phase. The old kings still rule by sheer volume. But the new powers—AI-native services—are the fastest-growing entities on the board. And the board itself is looking a bit wobbly. The takeaway for businesses? Don’t just optimize for Google and Facebook SEO anymore. Think about how your service interacts with AI agents and crawlers. And for heaven’s sake, have a redundancy plan that doesn’t rely on a single cloud or CDN. The internet’s center of gravity is shifting, and the infrastructure is straining under the weight. It’s going to be a fascinating, and probably bumpy, few years ahead.
For more on the user growth race between the major AI players, a report from The Information dives deeper into the numbers.
