2023 Internet Trends: Google Leads, Facebook Beats TikTok and More

2023 highlights include Google coming in at #1 website overall (with TikTok falling to #4), Facebook being top in the social category, OpenAI holding the top spot for generative AI, YouTube beating Netflix in the streaming wars, along with the finance industry experiencing the most cyber attacks in 2023. You can find top highlights below, an in-depth blog post here, and a blog post recapping top website rankings here.

2023 Internet Highlights:

Google won #1 for the second year in a row, with Tiktok falling to #4 after being #3 in 2022

• Most Popular Internet Services:

1. Google

2. Facebook

3. Apple

4. TikTok

5. Microsoft

Most Popular Internet Services by Cloudflare

Facebook beat Tiktok as #1 in the social media category

• Most Popular Social Media Services:

1. Facebook

2. TikTok

3. Instagram

4. Twitter/X

5. Snapchat

Continuing their 2023 tech reign, OpenAI was the most popular service in the emerging Generative AI category

• Most Popular Generative AI Services:

1. OpenAI

2. Character AI

3. Quillbot

4. Hugging Face

5. Poe

YouTube remained the top service for all video streaming, with Netflix leading among the paid streaming services

• Most Popular Streaming Services:

1. YouTube

2. Netflix

3. Twitch

4. Roku

5. Disney Plus

Other Notable Findings:

• Taylor Swift's official site entered our top 500 most popular websites list on August 10 (#464), when she announced her album '1989 (Taylor's Version).’

• Global traffic from Starlink nearly tripled in 2023. After initiating service in Brazil in mid-2022, Starlink traffic from that country was up over 17x in 2023.

• Global Internet traffic grew 25%. Major holidays, severe weather, and Internet shutdowns impacted Internet traffic.

• Over 180 Internet outages were observed around the world in 2023, with many due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of Internet connectivity. This is consistent with the amount of outages observed by Cloudflare in 2022.

This data comes from Cloudflare Radar, a free tool that lets anyone view global trends and insights across the Internet. Radar is powered by data from Cloudflare’s global network (spanning 300+ cities in 100+ countries), and aggregated and anonymized data from Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 public DNS Resolver, widely used as a fast and private way to browse the Internet. All rankings are based on positions compared to others and are not necessarily indicative of a single platform losing or gaining traffic.