Cloudflare just released its 2025 Radar Year in Review, a systems report on how the Internet actually behaved last year.
A few things stood out in my opinion:
👉 Most AI systems take far more than they give back.
AI bots now account for a meaningful slice of web traffic. Googlebot alone generates more HTML traffic than all other AI bots combined. User-triggered AI crawling exploded (20x+ YoY), while crawl-to-refer ratios show the brutal truth.
👉 Post-quantum crypto quietly crossed the midpoint
More than 52% of human web traffic now uses post-quantum TLS. This is driven by defaults: Once Apple flipped the switch in iOS, adoption accelerated.
👉 DDoS attacks: the absurd scale era.
2025 saw repeated 10-30 Tbps attacks!! This is no longer about "can you absorb traffic?" It's about whether your architecture assumes hostile bandwidth as a baseline.
👉 Physics is improving faster than politics
Traffic grew 19% globally, with acceleration late in the year. Starlink traffic more than doubled. Meanwhile, nearly half of major outages were still caused by government shutdowns.
👉 Bots, APIs, and Go ate the world.
20% of automated API traffic now comes from Go clients. Node dropped. Python surged. These are bots, not humans.
👉 The Dead Internet Theory: a conspiracy theory, but not entirely wrong.
Human traffic is no longer the dominant force. Bots talk to bots, scrape bots, train bots, and defend against bots. Large parts of the web now exist primarily for machines, not people.
⭐ Read a synthesized version of the report here: https://faun.dev/c/news/devopslinks/cloudflare-releases-2025-internet-trends-review/
