Cloudflare data suggests Google still leading the internet game by a long mile.
Global internet traffic has grown by more than 19pc, with Google still holding the top spot as the world’s most popular internet service.
Following Google in terms of most used services overall was Facebook, followed by Apple, Microsoft and Instagram.
IT service provider Cloudflare is estimated to be protecting some 24m websites. Its end of the year report has compiled data observed throughout its global network into patterns and trends on the internet.
It found that internet traffic in Ireland grew by 38pc this year, with Google ranking as the most used service followed by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Globally, it noted a continued meteoric rise in generative AI tools – with Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and Google’s Gemini catching up to ChatGPT. Reports suggest that the OpenAI chatbot is nearing 900m weekly active users, and Gemini is not far off.
Other services such as the recently acquired Windsurf AI, xAI’s Grok and DeepSeek also rank among the top 10.
Despite the rise of newer social media juggernauts such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram still rank as the most used social media sites.
Meanwhile, Google bot led the way as the largest verified bot on Cloudflare’s network, followed by a host of unverified bots.
Earlier this year Cloudflare de-listed Perplexity’s crawler as a verified bot after it found that the controversial AI search engine was stealth crawling websites.
While AI bots – also led by Google bot – crawled for content all over the internet collecting data for training.
2025 was also a year filled with outages. Data from Cloudflare shows clusters of outages in its network occurring over June and September.
In November, a Cloudflare outage disrupted numerous popular websites and online services, including X, OpenAI and Spotify. While a second outage in December disrupted sites such as Zoom, LinkedIn, Shopify and Canva.
However, Cloudflare was not alone. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure all suffered major outages this year affecting thousands of users online.
On the other hand, 2025 also saw major cyberattacks affecting global businesses and government organisations. SiliconRepublic.com recently looked at a few major incidents that occurred this year.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
