Cloudflare report: AI traffic surges, DDoS attacks escalate in 2025

Cloudflare Inc. has released its annual year-end review, highlighting significant trends in internet traffic, security, and AI activity observed throughout 2025. The report details a year marked by a substantial increase in artificial intelligence-driven traffic, the growing adoption of post-quantum cryptography, and the recording of some of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks to date, according to a recent report by Silicon Angle.

The review indicates a 19% growth in global internet traffic for 2025, with notable regional increases and impacts from real-world events like election shutdowns and hurricanes. AI activity emerged as a dominant theme, with Googlebot leading crawler traffic and AI bots collectively accounting for 4.2% of all HTML requests. User-action crawling, driven by AI assistants, saw a 15-fold increase. On the security front, 6.2% of global traffic was mitigated by Cloudflare, with hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks escalating, particularly affecting nonprofits and civic groups. Deceptive links and identity-based email threats remained prevalent.

Despite escalating threats like large-scale DDoS attacks, 2025 also marked a positive milestone with 52% of human-generated web traffic now protected by post-quantum cryptography, partly due to ecosystem adoption and an iOS update. The report underscores the internet's continued evolution, with AI trends expected to shift rapidly. The prevalence of government-mandated internet shutdowns for exam cheating also highlights ongoing regulatory and control challenges in connectivity, while mobile devices solidify their dominance in internet access across many nations.

Source: Silicon Angle