Website usage is shaped by billions of people, a rapidly mobile web, multiple discovery channels, and technical standards that determine whether pages can be found and used. The latest figures show both the scale of online activity and the uneven quality of access and experience around the world.
Table of contents
- Global internet access and adoption
- What people do online
- Devices and web access patterns
- Search and social discovery behavior
- Crawlability and AI-era indexing signals
- Website performance and user experience
Global internet access and adoption
The International Telecommunication Union reported that 5.5 billion people were online in 2024, equal to 68% of the world population. That still left 2.6 billion people offline, or about one-third of the global population. These figures describe the potential audience for websites, but they also show why global traffic should not be treated as a uniformly reachable market. (ITU, Facts and Figures 2024)
Internet use varied sharply by national income group in 2024. High-income countries reached 93% population usage, while low-income countries reached only 27%. Across Africa, internet penetration averaged 38%. The Arab States recorded approximately 70% penetration, and the Asia-Pacific region reached 66%.
The gaps were also pronounced for groups facing structural access constraints. Only 35% of people in least developed countries were online in 2024, while the figure for landlocked developing countries was 39%. For publishers and search-focused businesses, these differences matter when interpreting geographic traffic, conversion rates, and the likely reach of a global content strategy.
Growth was moving upward, but not evenly. Global internet-user growth accelerated to 3.4% in 2024, compared with 2.7% in 2023. The direction suggests continuing audience expansion, while the country and regional figures show that adoption remains at very different stages. (ITU, Facts and Figures 2024)
What people do online
DataReportal estimated that 5.56 billion people used the internet at the start of 2025, representing 67.9% global penetration. Its estimate also put the increase during 2024 at 136 million people, or 2.5%. The small difference between this estimate and the ITU’s 2024 figure reflects different reporting periods and measurement approaches, so the numbers should be read as dated estimates rather than interchangeable totals. (DataReportal, Digital 2025: Global Overview Report)
Mobile connectivity was even broader. At the start of 2025, 5.78 billion people used a mobile phone, equal to 70.5% of the world population. Smartphones represented almost 87% of mobile handsets in use worldwide. This helps explain why many website visits begin outside a traditional desktop environment.
Information seeking remains central to online activity. Finding information was a main reason for going online for 62.8% of adult internet users in the start-of-2025 survey wave. Websites that answer specific questions clearly therefore compete in a large, continuing information market, although audience size alone does not guarantee visibility or engagement.
Online activity also extends well beyond search. In the latest 2025 report data, the typical internet user spent 2 hours and 21 minutes per day on social media and used an average of 6.83 social platforms per month. A website may therefore receive attention from a user who moves between search, social feeds, video services, and direct brand destinations during the same day. (DataReportal, Digital 2025: Global Overview Report)
Streaming and online commerce were also widespread in the reported survey data. A reported 97.5% of internet users watched at least one form of television each month, and close to 92% watched some form of streaming television each month. Meanwhile, 31.5% said they paid for a streaming-television subscription. More than 2.5 billion people made online consumer-goods purchases during the 12 months covered by the 2025 report.
Devices and web access patterns
The web is strongly mobile in terms of page requests. Mobile devices accounted for more than 63% of web-page requests in December 2024. Ten years earlier, in December 2014, mobile devices accounted for 31.79% of requests. The comparison indicates a major shift in the technical context in which websites are loaded and evaluated. (DataReportal, Digital 2025: Global Overview Report)
Computers remain important, especially for work, research, and longer tasks. In Q3 2024, 61.5% of online adults used laptops or desktops to access connected services. That was lower than the 72.3% reported among internet users in Q1 2020. In the same Q3 2024 data, 53.6% used their own personal computer and 26.8% used a laptop or desktop supplied by their employer.
Regional behavior was not identical to the global pattern. In the latest survey wave reported in 2025, 75.5% of internet users in Europe said they used laptops or desktops to go online, compared with 72.7% of internet users in the United States who said they used computers to access the internet. These are survey measures of use, not shares of all page requests.
| Measure | Period | Reported figure |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile share of web-page requests | December 2024 | More than 63% |
| Mobile share of web-page requests | December 2014 | 31.79% |
| Laptop or desktop access among online adults | Q3 2024 | 61.5% |
| Computer access among U.S. internet users | Latest 2025 survey wave | 72.7% |
| Android share of worldwide mobile web traffic | December 2024 | 73.49% |
Android accounted for 73.49% of worldwide mobile web traffic in December 2024. For site owners, this device mix supports practical priorities such as responsive layouts, legible text, touch-friendly controls, and testing on common mobile operating environments. It does not, by itself, describe the share of users on every individual website. (DataReportal, Digital 2025: Global Overview Report)
Search and social discovery behavior
Search was the leading individual source among the listed channels for discovering new brands or products in the Q3 2024 survey data. Some 32.8% of surveyed connected consumers cited online search. Television advertising was close behind at 32.3%, followed by social-media ads at 29.7%. Brand websites were cited by 25.8% as a source of brand or product awareness.
Discovery was multi-channel rather than exclusive. Survey respondents cited an average of about 5.8 sources for discovering brands and products. This suggests that search visibility, social presence, advertising, and a useful website can reinforce one another, while the figures should not be added together as a total share of consumers.
Search’s share increased from 30.6% in Q3 2022 to 32.8% in Q3 2024. The share discovering brands through social-media ads rose from 26.6% to 29.7% across the same survey periods. Both comparisons describe reported survey responses, not a universal measure of every website visit or purchase.
Social platforms also functioned as research environments. In the latest wave reported in 2025, 62.3% of Instagram’s active adult users used the platform to research brands and products. The corresponding figures were 52.5% for Facebook’s active adult users and 51.5% for TikTok’s active adult users. A website that relies only on one discovery route may therefore miss people who begin product research on a social platform. (DataReportal, Digital 2025: Global Overview Report)
Crawlability and AI-era indexing signals
Technical access remains a prerequisite for discovery. In the 2025 Web Almanac crawl, a successful HTTP 200 response was returned for robots.txt on 84.9% of desktop sites and 84.9% of mobile sites. A robots.txt 404 response occurred on 13.3% of desktop sites and 13.2% of mobile sites. These results describe the sites in that crawl and should not be treated as a census of the whole web. (HTTP Archive, SEO | 2025 | The Web Almanac)
Most robots.txt files were small. Files of 0–100 bytes represented 97.5% of desktop sites and 97.6% of mobile sites in the analysis, while 98% of robots.txt files were under 100 KB. The wildcard user agent appeared in 77.04% of desktop robots.txt files and 77.14% of mobile files.
Named crawlers appeared less often. adsbot-google was named in 9.82% of desktop robots.txt files and 9.51% of mobile files. googlebot was named in 6.22% of desktop files and 6.66% of mobile files. gptbot appeared in 4.5% of desktop files and 4.2% of mobile files, while claudebot appeared in 3.6% and 3.4%, respectively.
The same 2025 analysis found a valid llms.txt file on 2.13% of desktop sites and 2.10% of mobile sites. Among the llms.txt files identified, All in One SEO was associated with 39.6% and Yoast SEO with 3.6%. These figures indicate adoption within the crawl, not a confirmed ranking benefit or a forecast of future search behavior.
Page-level directives were more common than llms.txt. Meta robots directives appeared on 47.0% of desktop pages and 47.9% of mobile pages. X-Robots-Tag directives appeared on 0.6% of desktop pages and 0.7% of mobile pages. (HTTP Archive, SEO | 2025 | The Web Almanac)
Website performance and user experience
The 2025 Web Almanac performance analysis found that good Core Web Vitals were achieved by 48% of mobile websites and 56% of desktop websites. Among the 1,000 most popular sites, the shares were higher: 51% of mobile sites and 59% of desktop sites had good Core Web Vitals. Popularity was therefore associated with better reported results in this comparison, but it did not mean every high-traffic site met the benchmark. (HTTP Archive, Performance | 2025 | The Web Almanac)
Performance varied further down the ranking. Good Core Web Vitals fell to 37% on the next 100,000 mobile sites after the top 10,000 in the 2025 ranking analysis. This gap is relevant to smaller publishers because broad web averages can conceal weaker results among less popular sites.
Images were the Largest Contentful Paint element on 85.3% of desktop pages and 76.0% of mobile pages in 2025. JPG was the Largest Contentful Paint image format on about 57% of both desktop and mobile pages. The figures identify how often images formed the largest visible element; they do not say that JPG was the best choice for every page.
Layout stability was stronger than the overall Core Web Vitals result. A good Cumulative Layout Shift score was recorded on 72% of desktop pages and 81% of mobile pages in 2025. Taken together, these measurements show that technical SEO has several distinct dimensions: allowing crawlers to access the site, exposing appropriate directives, loading the main content efficiently, and keeping the page stable while users interact with it. (HTTP Archive, Performance | 2025 | The Web Almanac)