The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review: The rise of AI, post-quantum, and record-breaking DDoS attacks
Blog post from Cloudflare
The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review provides a comprehensive analysis of Internet trends and patterns observed through Cloudflare's expansive global network, which handled an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second and more than 67 million DNS queries per second. The report highlights key findings across six sections: Traffic, AI, Adoption & Usage, Connectivity, Security, and Email Security, using data from January 1 to December 2, 2025. Significant insights include a 19% global growth in Internet traffic, a doubling of Starlink traffic, and the notable presence of Googlebot in AI and search-related requests. The report also addresses the rise in post-quantum encrypted traffic, the popularity of iOS in mobile device traffic, and the persistence of JavaScript-based tools for web development. In terms of security, the document notes a 6% mitigation rate of global traffic, with significant DDoS attack activity and malicious email threats, while also observing improvements in routing security through increased RPKI valid routes. The report concludes with an emphasis on the dynamic nature of AI trends and encourages exploration of the detailed data available on the Cloudflare Radar microsite.
| Trend | Post Mentions | Total Month Mentions | Posts | Companies | MoM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time | 6 | 7,285 | 1,202 | 224 | +60% |
| RAG | 2 | 909 | 198 | 86 | -19% |
| AI Coding Assistant | 1 | 621 | 185 | 88 | -35% |
| AI Guardrails | 1 | 385 | 124 | 47 | -48% |
| AI Model Fine-tuning | 1 | 603 | 116 | 61 | +8% |
| LLM | 1 | 3,775 | 638 | 202 | -32% |
| Observability | 1 | 2,671 | 527 | 151 | +5% |
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