According to Cloudflare, the internet's second-largest content delivery network (CDN), global internet traffic grew nearly 20% in 2025. You and I watching more YouTube videos is not what's driving that growth. Much of this rise comes from bots, AI crawlers, and automated attacks rather than human users. At the same time, satellite connectivity, post-quantum encryption, and mobile-heavy use have reshaped how and where people access the internet. Cloudflare's 2025 Radar Year in Review shows global internet traffic rising by about 19% year over year, with growth accelerating sharply from late summer through November. Behind that overall growth, non-human activity expanded even faster. A significant share of global traffic passing through Cloudflare's network was classified as bot traffic, including search crawlers, AI agents, and outright malicious automation. In particular, AI bots are making life miserable for website owners as they strip-mine the net for large language model (LLM) data. Earlier this year, Cloudflare reported that 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots, with AI bots leading the way. These bots put tremendous pressure on websites, generating as many as 30 terabits of data requests in a single surge. That's high enough that the demands of AI bots amount to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. As a result, AI became a central driver of internet traffic in 2025. As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said in a statement, "The internet isn't just changing, it's being fundamentally rewired. From AI to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different." Googlebot again generated the highest request volume to Cloudflare, crawling millions of sites for both traditional search indexing and AI training. Googlebot is responsible for about 4.5% of all HTML requests across Cloudflare‑protected sites in 2025 and reaches 11.6% of unique pages in a focused AI‑crawler sample. Googlebot outpaces other AI-oriented crawlers -- such as OpenAI's GPTBot, the next most active AI crawler, and Microsoft's Bingbot -- by a wide margin. AI "user action" crawling bots, such as Perplexity's user agent, which fetch pages in response to chatbot prompts or agent workflows, grew more than 15-fold over the year. How we get to the internet keeps tilting in favor of smartphones. Today, 43% of us use smartphones to access the internet, with only 57% still using PCs. Digging deeper, while Apple iOS devices dominate in the US, iOS accounted for about 35% of global mobile traffic worldwide. Globally, Android remained the volume leader, accounting for 65%. The market share of other mobile operating systems is negligible. As for web browsers, it's no surprise that, according to Cloudflare's count, Google Chrome is the most popular browser, with 67.9% of the desktop market and 85.4% of the mobile market. On the desktop, Edge, Microsoft's Chrome-based browser, has 14.4%. FireFox? It's down to 6.7%. Inside the US, the federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP), with its running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, also has Chrome on top with 64.6%. That's followed by Safari with 22.8%, thanks to America's love affair with iPhones, then Edge's 7.4%, and Firefox limping in at an ever-declining 1.7%. There are no surprises here. You could probably guess the top five websites: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Instagram. However, the more you look, the more interesting it gets. For example, in the AI arena, ChatGPT is at the top, followed by Claude/Anthropic in second place, and Perplexity in third. Copilot? It's in sixth place. Microsoft is putting Copilot into everything, and Windows Kitchen Sink doesn't seem to be working. The top five social networks, with Facebook at the top, have one surprise. LinkedIn is in fifth. Twitter/X? It's in the sixth spot. Video streaming remains dominated by YouTube. Netflix is in second place, followed by Twitch, Roku (Yes, Roku), and then Disney+ in fifth. Satellite internet moved from early-adopter novelty toward mainstream infrastructure. Cloudflare's data shows that Starlink traffic more than doubled globally in 2025, with overall request volume increasing by about 2.3 times over the year. That growth coincided with the launch of services in more than 20 new countries and regions, and continued uptake in markets where Starlink was already available. This expansion is bringing broadband to rural areas, where Starlink has become the default choice for users wanting fast internet. Cloudflare's network saw the impact as new clusters of traffic appeared in previously low-activity regions, while some markets experienced brief turbulence as terrestrial ISPs adjusted peering and routing to accommodate the new mix. For more trun to OUR FORUM.