Global expansion in Generative AI: a year of growth, newcomers, and attacks

Generative AI’s breakout year: traffic, newcomers, and attack surface

Generative AI moved from curiosity to infrastructure over the past year. Using aggregated data from Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver and from the cohort of Generative AI services that run on Cloudflare, we tracked how these platforms grew, which newcomers broke into the top ranks, and how attackers responded to their rise.

Key findings:

• ChatGPT holds the crown: OpenAI’s ChatGPT sits around the top 50 of all Internet domains, up from roughly #200 in late 2023.
• Massive traffic growth: Monthly traffic to Generative AI services grew 251% between February 1, 2024, and March 1, 2025.
• Fast risers: Chinese chatbot DeepSeek and Grok/xAI climbed the charts within weeks of launch.
• Regional skew: The U.S. accounts for 23% of Generative AI visitors, but Asia dominates platforms like poe.com; Brazil shows up as a top market for several services.
• Under fire: Cloudflare blocked 197 billion potential attack requests in the past year, 39 billion of which were DDoS attacks aimed at Generative AI websites.

Popularity rankings: new challengers enter the top 10

Cloudflare Radar’s AI insights page tracks the most popular Generative AI services. As of early March 2025, ChatGPT/OpenAI has held the #1 spot since the start of the year. The newest entrant to the top 10 is DeepSeek, a Chinese chatbot released on January 10, 2025; it debuted at #9 on January 26, jumped to #3 by January 29, and settled at #6 by March.

Grok/xAI also broke into the top 10 in late February 2025, following the launch of Grok-3 on February 17 and the release of its Android app. It entered at #9 on February 21, briefly took Claude’s usual #8 spot, and now fluctuates between #9 and #10.

The full February 2025 top 10 (monthly average) includes:

1. ChatGPT / OpenAI
2. Character.AI
3. QuillBot
4. Codeium
5. GitHub Copilot
6. DeepSeek
7. Perplexity
8. Claude
9. Hugging Face
10. Suno AI

Grok/xAI appears at #11 for February since it entered the top 10 only in the final days of the month. The rest of the top 20 includes Poe (#12), Sider AI (#13), Civitai (#14), Tabnine (#15), Google Gemini (#16), Voicemod (#17), GliaCloud (#18), Runway ml (#19), and Midjourney (#20). AI coding services are heavily represented: beyond Codeium and GitHub Copilot, Sider AI and Tabnine also made the list.

ChatGPT climbs the overall Internet rankings

ChatGPT’s influence now extends beyond AI-specific lists. In Cloudflare Radar’s top 100 overall Internet services ranking (based on 1.1.1.1 DNS traffic), ChatGPT/OpenAI typically sits in the mid-50s on weekdays and near #60 on weekends, alongside services like Temu, eBay, and Disney Plus. In early 2023 it ranked around #200; by the end of 2024 it was just outside the top 100. It hit the top 60 in May 2024 following the release of the GPT-4o model and has hovered near the top 50 since September 2024, when work and school routines resumed.

Where Generative AI traffic comes from

DNS traffic data from Cloudflare Radar (based on 1.1.1.1 resolver activity over a 48-hour period in early March 2025) shows clear regional patterns per platform:

• chatgpt.com: The U.S. leads with 17% of DNS traffic, followed by Germany (7%), Brazil (4%), Indonesia (4%), and India (4%).
• deepseek.com: The U.S. is #1 at 14%, with China (11%), Germany (10%), Brazil (7%), and Hong Kong (5%) behind it.
• grok.com: The U.S. has 20% of traffic, but Asia is prominent in the top 5: Hong Kong (8%), Japan (6%), and Vietnam (6%), plus Germany (6%).
• poe.com: Hong Kong dominates at 29%, followed by the U.S. (13%), Japan (6%), China (6%), and Singapore (5%).
• huggingface.co: The U.S. is top at 34%, with four European countries in the top 5: France (6%), the U.K. (6%), Germany (4%), and Sweden (4%).
• AI coding tools (githubcopilot.com, codeium.com, cursor.com, tabnine.com): The U.S. leads all of them (15-22%), with Hong Kong appearing in the top 5 for each; India and Japan are also frequent presences.

Aggregating across all Generative AI websites, the U.S. ranks #1 with 23% of requests, followed by India (8%), Brazil (5%), Indonesia (4%), and the Philippines (4%). Egypt is the first African country at #32, tied with South Africa at 0.7%.

Traffic growth: a 251% year

Among Cloudflare’s cohort of Generative AI customers — spanning large platforms, niche startups, chatbots, and image generators — monthly HTTP traffic grew 251% from February 1, 2024, to March 1, 2025. Even excluding customers that onboarded in late 2024 and early 2025, growth was 234%, indicating that existing services drove most of the increase.

The daily traffic pattern shows clear dips during the Christmas holiday period and a slight summer lull in July. Weekday traffic consistently exceeds weekend traffic, suggesting that much of this usage is workplace-driven.

Over 2% of all requests processed by Cloudflare for these services were mitigated as potential attacks.

Attack trends: chatbots draw the fire

Generative AI platforms have become prime targets for cyberattacks. Cloudflare’s Cloudforce One team recently detailed how the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two Sudanese brothers behind “LameDuck,” a threat operation linked to 35,000+ DDoS attacks via the Skynet Botnet, with political and financial motives.

From February 1, 2024, to March 1, 2025, Cloudflare blocked 197 billion requests as potential attacks against Generative AI customers. Of those, 39 billion were part of DDoS attacks. June 2024 saw the highest number of total blocked attack requests, followed by January 2025. For DDoS specifically, January 2025 was the peak month, followed by November 2024 and February 2024.

At the daily level, the largest single DDoS event hit on February 23, 2024, when 3.7 billion requests were blocked — over 20% of all requests across the entire Generative AI customer cohort at that time. The second-largest was a 1.5 billion request attack on November 13, 2024. A multiday campaign between January 20-31, 2025, peaked on January 29 with over one billion DDoS-related requests in a single day (7.3 billion for the month).

One targeted customer saw attacks begin on February 22, 2024, at 22:45 UTC, with continuous traffic spikes lasting over eight hours and peaking at 270,000 requests per second. A follow-up attack on February 26 at 03:45 UTC lasted three minutes and peaked at 309,000 requests per second. Another customer faced a campaign from January 25-31, 2025, peaking at 523,000 requests per second on January 30.

By category, general AI chatbots absorbed over 80% of all blocked DDoS requests, making them the primary targets. However, when measured as a proportion of each category’s total traffic, image-generation websites were hit hardest, with over 50% of their requests blocked as DDoS attacks.

The state of play

Generative AI has driven traffic growth of over 250% year-over-year, pushed ChatGPT into the upper ranks of all Internet services, and welcomed newcomers like DeepSeek and Grok/xAI into the top 10 within weeks. Regional adoption varies sharply by platform, with the U.S., India, and Brazil as the leading visitor markets overall.

That visibility comes with a cost: 39 billion DDoS requests aimed at Generative AI in the past year, mostly targeting chatbots, while image generators suffer the highest percentage of blocked traffic. As the sector grows, these metrics offer a running record of its expansion, its geography, and its vulnerabilities.