ChatGPT Rivals and Kwai's Quiet Climb Among 2025's Leading Internet Services

Cloudflare's Radar team published its 2025 Year in Review on December 15, 2025, authored by João Tomé, and tagged with DNS, Internet Traffic, Radar, Trends, and Year in Review. The report looks at which online services were most used around the world during the year. Two stories stand out in the headline: competitors to the ChatGPT AI assistant are now significant enough to be called out by name, and the short video platform Kwai has grown quietly but steadily. To understand why these rankings matter, it helps to know how Cloudflare Radar measures internet use. The Domain Name System, or DNS, is the phone book of the internet: it translates a human-friendly address like example.com into the numeric IP address that computers use to connect. Every time you open an app, visit a website, or stream a video, your device typically asks a DNS resolver to look up that address. By observing aggregated DNS query patterns and internet traffic across its global network, Cloudflare Radar can see which services people actually reach, not just which apps they have installed.

The rise of ChatGPT rivals is a notable shift. For much of the generative AI boom, one service dominated the conversation, but in 2025 the competitive landscape broadened. Multiple AI chatbots and assistants attracted large numbers of users around the world. This matters for everyday internet users because a more competitive AI market can lead to more choice in features, pricing, and privacy practices. At the same time, Kwai's quiet rise shows that short-form video is no longer limited to one or two well-known Western platforms. Kwai, a short video app that began in China and has expanded internationally, has built a substantial user base, especially in regions where local content and language support are important. The report's framing suggests Kwai has become one of the top internet services of 2025 without the same level of mainstream attention as some of its rivals.

For privacy-conscious readers, the method behind these rankings is as important as the results. Traditional DNS queries often travel over the network in plain text. That means your internet service provider, the operator of a public Wi-Fi hotspot, or anyone who can see your network traffic can see which domains you are asking about. Even if the content of a website is encrypted with HTTPS, the DNS lookup that happens first can reveal the site's name. Encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS over HTTPS (DoH), DNS over TLS (DoT), and DNS over QUIC (DoQ), wrap these lookups in encryption so that only you and the DNS resolver you trust can see them. This is a key privacy control for anyone who does not want their browsing history inferred from DNS logs. The growth of data-hungry AI services and video platforms makes this protection even more relevant, because the more services you use, the more DNS lookups you generate.

Cloudflare Radar's year in review is based on aggregated, anonymized data from a huge global network, and it does not identify individual users. Still, the fact that DNS data can be used to rank the world's most popular services shows how much behavioral signal sits inside DNS requests. When you use a default DNS resolver from your internet provider, your provider may keep logs of every domain you visit. When you use a privacy-first encrypted DNS resolver that commits to not keeping logs, you reduce the amount of data that can be collected, sold, or exposed in a breach. In many places, DNS logs are treated as personal data because they can reveal a person's browsing history, so choosing a resolver that minimizes logging is both a privacy and a safety decision.

The trends in the 2025 review, from ChatGPT competitors to Kwai's rise, show that the internet is becoming more diverse and more driven by AI and short video. As these services compete for attention, they also collect more behavioral data, making it harder for an ordinary user to keep their activity private. One practical step is to switch to an encrypted, no-logs DNS resolver such as AEU DNS, so that your DNS lookups are protected from snooping and not stored for profiling. Beyond DNS, users can take several other basic steps to limit how much data these top services collect.