Global internet traffic grows 17% as Google maintains its digital dominance

The news: Global internet traffic grew 17% YoY in 2024, according to content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare in its year-in-review report. Google continued to dominate in various areas, including as the most popular internet service—it captured 88% of global search traffic.

Google also maintained its lead in browsers, with Chrome driving 65.8% of all web requests, followed by Apple’s Safari with 15.5%, and Microsoft’s Bing with 2.6%.

A snapshot of internet activity: Cloudflare found that global traffic grew modestly in early 2024 and surged in mid-August through November to reach 17.2%, mirroring trends from 2023 and 2022.

• Googlebot, which crawls the web for Google Search and Gemini AI, generated the most requested traffic to Cloudflare in 2024, retrieving content from millions of sites for indexing.
• Mobile traffic accounted for 41.3% of all internet traffic, with Android dominating globally except in high-income regions, which favored Apple’s iOS. In nearly 100 countries and regions, the majority of traffic came from mobile devices.
• The US accounted for 34.6% of global bot traffic, driven by Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 12.7% and Google at 7.8%. 
• AI bots like Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and ByteDance’s Bytespider showed notable activity spikes, highlighting the growing role of AI in web crawling.

Google’s lead is secure: Google’s sustained dominance shows its critical role in shaping internet usage patterns. We forecast that Google’s search ad revenues would grow to $67.32 billion in 2024, a 15.3% YoY change.

Google’s supremacy in search, browsing, and mobile traffic remain unchallenged in 2024. Its web services and tools continue to shape the digital landscape, and significant contributions to bot traffic reflect its influence on search indexing and web monitoring. 

Our take: Businesses must optimize for Google’s ecosystem—search rankings, ad platforms, and browser compatibility—to maximize visibility and user engagement in a competitive market. 

Google is unlikely to drop out of its No. 1 position, but growing competition in AI and search, as well as potential regulatory penalties, could destabilize its lead in a number of areas.

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