Cloudflare now fastest in 74% of the largest networks
Cloudflare is the fastest provider in 74% of the world's 1,000 largest networks as of August, up from 60% in April 2026 during Agents Week. Reaching that figure meant becoming fastest in 150 additional networks within the top 1,000, and Cloudflare now ranks first in 38 additional countries.
The ranking is computed by identifying the fastest provider for users on the networks that serve the largest number of users in each country.
Measuring connection time
The analysis starts from the 1,000 largest networks worldwide, ranked by estimated user population using APNIC data. Each network is evaluated on connection time — the time a user's device needs to complete a TCP handshake when requesting content. That metric tracks closely with what users perceive as speed, since it reflects distance, routing and congestion while remaining specific enough to compare providers.
Providers are ranked by the trimean of connection times: a weighted average combining the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles that limits the influence of outliers without hiding the range of experiences most users see.
A visit to a Cloudflare-branded error page can trigger a small background measurement in the browser, fetching lightweight files from Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Google, Fastly and Akamai. The time each connection takes is recorded from that user's browser, on that user's network, at that moment. Error pages have supplied this real-user data since 2021, but measurement improves with scale, which is why Cloudflare has added a second collection path.
Adding Challenge Pages to the dataset
Cloudflare Challenge Pages are full-page screens that verify visitors before they reach a site. When a Web Application Firewall rule actions a challenge, the page holds the request, evaluates the browser environment for automated signals, and admits legitimate visitors, usually without interaction. The pages are delivered by Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-preserving, risk-based challenge technology running in the visitor's browser.
Because challenges appear across many websites and network conditions, they offer a way to collect performance data where people actually use the Internet. Site owners can enable them via the Cloudflare Challenge Pages documentation.
What runs in the browser
For the visitor, Challenge Page measurement is invisible: while the page is displayed, a small non-interactive test fetches lightweight files from a fixed set of endpoints including Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Google, Fastly and Akamai, recording whether each request completed and how long it took. It is designed not to add noticeable latency and to preserve Turnstile's privacy properties.
Measurements currently run on a small fraction of eligible free Challenge Pages, alongside the existing error-page collection. Cloudflare will limit these tests to free Challenge Pages and only raise the sampling rate if the extra data improves measurement quality without affecting end-user performance.
Why reach matters
Challenge Pages extend measurement beyond the narrower set of use cases that produce branded error pages, capturing data during everyday interactions wherever a challenge is already served. That increases both volume and the diversity of users, networks and geographies observed.
The added breadth also opens analytical options a network-count ranking alone cannot support: weighting performance by the number of people who experience it, grouping results by country or worldwide rather than by network, and quantifying the share of total user traffic represented by measured networks. The methodology also sharpens resolution where the race is closest — in many networks top providers are separated by only a millisecond or two of trimean connection time, so extra volume narrows the confidence interval around each provider's trimean and separates a genuine lead from day-to-day variation.
This improvement coincides with the new methodology. Cloudflare may previously have ranked second in networks where its trimean was only 1 or 2 ms behind the leader; with more samples, results are less sensitive to outliers and rankings more stable, particularly where the fastest provider used to change from day to day. The results shared here are early.
Ongoing work
Performance and its measurement both improve continuously. This year's numbers put Cloudflare first in 74% of the top networks measured, and the Challenge Pages methodology provides a broader, more stable view of Internet performance. Cloudflare plans to keep using that data to find where it can be faster and to validate the impact of its improvements.
