Cloudflare publishes statistics on Internet traffic in 2023. The list of most popular websites has a notable new addition.
December is traditionally the list month, which is why Cloudflare also shares its list Annual review in a blog. As one of the largest global providers of internet services, Cloudflare can provide interesting figures on global internet usage. Due to increasing digitalization, we are becoming more and more dependent on internet traffic and this is also reflected in the numbers. Compared to the previous year, total global internet traffic increased by 25 percent.
40 percent of all internet traffic now comes via smartphones, with the share of mobile phones increasing every year. In 80 countries, the smartphone is now the dominant hardware medium for surfing. Android can claim the lion’s share, accounting for two-thirds of mobile Internet traffic.
More traffic also seems to be associated with more disruption. Cloudflare counted 180 major internet outages last year. These are mainly due to deliberate actions by governments that have paralyzed internet traffic in certain regions or at a national level.
The most popular are Google and OpenAI
Google can still call itself the king of the internet in 2023. The search engine remains the website that attracts the most internet traffic. Facebook and Apple are allowed on stage, but TikTok falls just behind. Behind the scenes, Google Analytics is still the most popular tool for registering website visitors.
Cloudflare is also adding a brand new category this year: “Most Popular Generative AI Platform.” It’s no surprise that ChatGPT is at the top: OpenAI’s chatbot is almost single-handedly responsible for creating this category. Character AI, Quillbot and Hugging Face follow in OpenAI’s footsteps. So there’s no sign of Google here, although the tech giant hopes to change that next year.
Malicious Internet traffic
Not everyone on the World Wide Web has good intentions. Approximately six percent of all internet traffic was identified by Cloudflare as (potentially) malicious. Fraudulent links and email extortion attempts were the two most common types of attacks. The financial sector suffered the most worldwide.