Googlebot also generated more traffic than any other search engine in 2025, according to a new Cloudflare report. It has gone through all the search and AI bots as Google continues to crawl the web for search index and AI training.
In numbers. Googlebot accounted for over 25% of all Verified Bot traffic seen by Cloudflare.
- Googlebot alone generated 4.5% of all HTML request traffic – more than all other AI bots combined (4.2%).
- AI “user action” crawls increased more than 15x year-over-year, indicating a significant increase in bots that mimic human behavior.
- Googlebot’s search volume dwarfed all other AI searches, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
AI creep is on the rise. AI crawlers were not working for users who are often not fully allowed in robots.txt files.
- Anthropic has demonstrated the highest crawl-to-referral ratio among major AI and search platforms, meaning it crawls through much more content than bounces back traffic. The ratio peaked around ~500,000:1 at the beginning of the year, then settled between ~25,000:1 and ~100,000:1 after May. To compare:
- OpenAI went up to ~3,700:1 in March.
- Confusion was the lowest among the major AI platforms. It started below 100:1, jumped slightly above 700:1 in late March during the PerplexityBot crawl, then stayed below 400:1 and stayed below 200:1 from September onwards.
The search fields look very different:
- Microsoft ranges between ~50:1 and ~70:1 on a weekly basis.
- Google increased from just over ~3:1 to ~30:1 in April, dropped to ~3:1 in mid-July, then slowly increased again.
- DuckDuckGo stayed below 1:1 for the first three quarters, then jumped to ~1.5:1 in mid-October and remained high.
Google still manages search. The dominance of traditional search hasn’t changed at all.
- Google remained the top search engine by a wide margin, bringing in nearly 90% of the search engine’s referral traffic.
- Bing (3.1%), Yandex (2.0%), Baidu (1.4%), and DuckDuckGo (1.2%) made up the top five.
- Cloudflare saw little movement during the year.
- Google is always the best all around.
- Yandex fell from 2.5% in May to 1.5% in July.
- Baidu rose from 0.9% in April to 1.6% in June.
Report. Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review: The Rise of AI, Post-Quantum, and Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks
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