"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."
"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."
Global internet traffic grew nearly 20% in 2025, with growth accelerating sharply from late summer through November. Non-human activity expanded faster than human traffic, and a significant share of traffic was classified as bot traffic, including search crawlers, AI agents, and malicious automation. AI bots are strip-mining the web for LLM training data, accounting for about 30% of web traffic and generating surges up to 30 terabits of requests, creating DDoS-level demands. Satellite connectivity, post-quantum encryption adoption, and mobile-heavy usage reshaped how and where people access the internet.
#internet-traffic-growth #bots--ai-crawlers #ddos-threats #satellite-connectivity #post-quantum-encryption
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