The internet just got way weirder and humans are no longer the ones in charge
A deep dive into why 2025 was the year the internet stopped being for humans and started being for AI bots and satellites.
- neuralshyam
- 6 min read
If you’ve felt like the internet is getting a bit “crowded” lately, you’re not imagining it. But here’s the kicker: it’s not because your grandma finally learned how to use TikTok. According to the latest data from Cloudflare, the web grew by a massive 20% in 2025, but the people behind the keyboards aren’t the ones moving the needle.
We’ve officially entered the era of the “Ghost Internet,” where bots, AI crawlers, and automated scripts are doing most of the heavy lifting (and most of the complaining). Honestly, it feels like we’re just guests in a digital world built for machines. Let’s break down what actually happened to our digital playground over the last year.
The rise of the machine roommates
So, why is internet traffic exploding if we aren’t all suddenly spending 24 hours a day on YouTube? The short answer is AI. Specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs) are hungry, and they’re eating the entire internet to get smarter.
About 30% of all web traffic right now is just bots. Not the “helpful chatbot” kind, but the “I’m going to scrape every word you’ve ever written” kind. These AI crawlers are so aggressive that they’re basically accidental DDoS attacks. Imagine a million robots trying to squeeze through your front door at the same time just to see what brand of cereal you eat. That’s what website owners are dealing with.
Googlebot is still the heavyweight champion here. It’s responsible for nearly 5% of all web requests because it’s busy indexing stuff for search and training Google’s AI. Trailing behind are OpenAI’s GPTBot and Microsoft’s Bingbot. But the real mover and shaker is the “user action” bot—like Perplexity—which has grown 15-fold. These bots go out and fetch pages specifically because a human asked a chatbot a question. The middleman is officially taking over.
How we’re actually getting online
Even though the bots are winning, we humans still have our preferences. If you thought we’d all be using futuristic VR goggles by now, I’ve got bad news: we’re still mostly glued to our phones and laptops.
The split is roughly 43% mobile and 57% PC. It’s a bit of a “business in the front, party in the back” situation. Most of us still use PCs for work, but for everything else, it’s the smartphone. Globally, Android is still the king of the hill with a 65% market share, while iOS sits at 35%. However, if you’re in the US, that blue-bubble vs. green-bubble war is very much weighted toward Apple.
When it comes to browsers, Chrome is basically the Monopoly man. It owns about 68% of the desktop market and a staggering 85% of mobile. Microsoft Edge is trying its best (14%), and Firefox is… well, Firefox is hanging in there with 6%, which is honestly a bit tragic for the old-school internet fans. There’s a new wave of “AI-first” browsers like ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet, but for now, they’re just tiny ripples in a very large ocean. People are still a bit sketched out about the privacy side of an AI-powered browser, and honestly, can you blame them?
The social and streaming leaderboard
Where are we hanging out? No surprises on the big ones: Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft still own our souls. But the AI rankings are where it gets spicy. ChatGPT is the undisputed leader, with Claude and Perplexity filling out the top three. Microsoft’s Copilot is sitting in sixth place, which is awkward considering they’ve tried to bake it into every single corner of Windows. Maybe we don’t need an AI to help us open a Notepad file after all?
On the social side, LinkedIn is surprisingly in the top five. Apparently, the hustle culture is stronger than ever. Meanwhile, X (formerly Twitter) is sliding down the charts, sitting behind LinkedIn in sixth place. For video, YouTube is still the king, followed by Netflix and Twitch. Shoutout to Roku for cracking the top four—who knew those little streaming sticks had that much pull?
The internet is coming from space now
One of the coolest shifts in 2025 has been the “mainstreaming” of satellite internet. Starlink traffic more than doubled this year. It’s no longer just for tech bros in vans or people living in the middle of a forest; it’s becoming a legitimate backbone for rural areas everywhere.
We’re seeing huge traffic spikes in places that used to be digital dead zones. And Elon isn’t going to be alone up there for long. Amazon is about to launch its “Project Kuiper” (Amazon Leo), which means we’re about to have a full-blown space race for our Wi-Fi signals. If you’ve got a clear view of the sky, you’ve got a high-speed connection. What a time to be alive.
Why things feel a bit more “fragile”
It’s not all space lasers and smart bots, though. The internet in 2025 felt a lot more brittle. About 6% of all traffic had to be blocked because it was malicious. We’re talking massive DDoS attacks—like the Aisuru botnet, which has an army of over a million infected devices. These attacks are so big that they don’t just take down the target; they slow down the internet for everyone nearby. It’s like a digital traffic jam caused by a pile-up five miles ahead of you.
We also dealt with some massive outages this year. Between government-ordered shutdowns and technical meltdowns at places like Cloudflare, AWS, and Microsoft, we were reminded just how centralized the web has become. When one of these giants trips, half the world stops working. It’s a bit scary how a few hours of downtime can basically stall the global economy.
Final thoughts from the digital trenches
The 2025 internet is faster, smarter, and way more automated, but it also feels a bit more hostile. We’ve got “post-quantum” encryption now (which sounds like something out of an Avengers movie), protecting over half of our traffic from future hackers. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we’re increasingly sharing our bandwidth with a trillion bots who are just trying to learn how to write poetry or code apps.
Are we heading toward a world where humans are the minority on the web? Probably. But as long as we can still stream our shows and send our memes via satellite from a mountain top, I guess we’ll manage. Just maybe don’t trust every “human” you meet in a comment section—they might just be a very well-disguised scraper bot looking for its next meal.