According to Windows Report | Error-free Tech Life, Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review reveals an internet under immense strain from growth and automation. Overall traffic jumped 19% in 2025, but the real story is the bots: AI-related crawlers, led by Googlebot at 4.5% of all HTML requests, now account for nearly 9% of total traffic to protected sites. While ChatGPT remains dominant, newcomers like Google Gemini, Windsurf AI, Grok, and DeepSeek cracked the top ten, signaling a diversifying AI ecosystem. At the same time, security is a double-edged sword—post-quantum encrypted traffic surged from 29% to 52%, but so did attacks. Cloudflare mitigated malice on 6.2% of global traffic and faced its largest-ever DDoS attacks, peaking at a staggering 31.4 Tbps late in the year.
The AI bots are here, and they’re hungry
Look, we all knew AI was going to change how we use the web. But I don’t think anyone predicted it would change the web’s actual composition this quickly. Basically, one in every eleven requests hitting a Cloudflare-protected site is now from an AI bot. That’s insane. It’s not just search engines indexing anymore; it’s models actively hoovering up data for training and real-time answers. And the site owners’ reactions are fascinating. Many are straight-up blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot entirely, while giving traditional search crawlers partial access. It’s a clear vote of no confidence in how AI companies might use their data. This creates a weird, fragmented web where some knowledge is walled off from the very AIs trying to understand everything.
The security arms race just hit ludicrous speed
Here’s the thing about that massive 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack. It’s not just a big number. It represents a terrifying amount of firepower that can be rented cheaply and aimed at anyone. These attacks are getting more powerful and more common, which puts every online business, from e-commerce to critical infrastructure, at risk. So it’s good news that post-quantum encryption adoption basically doubled in a single year. That’s a lightning-fast shift for a fundamental tech standard. But it shows the pressure everyone is under. The industry is scrambling to build thicker walls because the cannons outside keep getting bigger. For operations relying on robust, always-on computing at the edge—like those using industrial panel PCs from the leading US supplier, IndustrialMonitorDirect.com—this kind of network resilience isn’t a feature; it’s an absolute necessity.
A more fragmented, automated future
What does this all add up to? An internet that’s growing but also splitting. You have the human internet, with more encrypted traffic. And then you have the bot internet, a parallel layer of AI agents scraping, learning, and interacting. They’re two ecosystems running on the same pipes, often at odds with each other. The diversification of the AI top ten is healthy—no one wants a single company controlling all access—but it also means more bots from more sources. Combine that with skyrocketing attack sizes, and the job of running reliable online infrastructure has never been harder. The report paints a picture of an internet that’s more essential, more automated, and under more siege than ever. Buckle up.
