Mobile vs desktop request share: Cloudflare Radar 2025

Site owners often assume the web is mostly mobile. Cloudflare’s own 2025 data says otherwise at the global level: mobile devices generated 43% of requests, and the balance came from what the company calls “classic” laptop and desktop devices. That figure appears in the 2025 Year in Review, which Cloudflare published on December 15, 2025, and every number below is taken from that page.

What share of global web requests comes from mobile?#

Aggregated across 2025, 43% of requests came from mobile devices, up from 41% in 2024. Cloudflare sorts each request into mobile, desktop or other using the User-Agent header. It notes that the shares are in line with those in its Year in Review reports back to 2022, which it reads as mobile usage reaching a “steady state”. A two-point rise is small next to that history, so the report does not describe a shift.

Where is mobile the majority?#

In 117 countries and regions, more than half of requests came from mobile devices. Sudan led at 75% and Malawi followed at 74%. Eswatini, Yemen, Botswana, Mozambique and Somalia also had mobile shares above 70%. At the other end, Gibraltar was the only location below 10%, at 5.1%, and just six others were under 25%. In 2024 a dozen locations had a mobile share below 25%.

What does this mean for SEO reporting?#

Treat it as a base rate, not a benchmark for your site. Cloudflare counts requests on its own network, which is a different unit from Google Search clicks or analytics sessions, and its audience mix will not match yours. The useful check is the direction of the gap: if your organic traffic is far more mobile than 43%, or far less, your audience or your reporting differs from the global pattern, and that is worth explaining before it is optimized. For indexing implications, see technical SEO and our timeline of mobile-first indexing.

Which phones and browsers make up the mobile share?#

The same Year in Review splits mobile traffic by operating system. iOS devices generated 35% of mobile device traffic globally in 2025, two points more than a year earlier. iOS passed 50% in 30 countries and regions, including Monaco at 70%, Denmark at 65% and Japan at 57%, while Android topped 90% in 27, with Papua New Guinea at 97%. Across all traffic, Chrome carried about two-thirds of requests, followed by Safari at 15.4%, Edge at 7.4%, Firefox at 3.7% and Samsung Internet at 2.3%. On iOS, Safari held 79% against Chrome’s 19%. On Android, Chrome held 85% and Samsung Internet 6.6%. If your market leans toward iOS, Safari testing deserves the same weight as Chrome.

Why does a 43% mobile share not lower mobile’s weight in Google?#

Because Google indexes the mobile version regardless of how your visitors split. Its documentation says Google “uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking.” So even a site whose traffic is mostly desktop is judged on its mobile pages. Google’s checklist asks for the same content, the same structured data, equivalent titles and meta descriptions, and the same robots meta tags on both versions. It also warns that it “won’t load content that requires user interactions,” so primary content should not be lazy-loaded on tap or scroll, and recommends responsive design as the easiest pattern to maintain. A quick first check is the meta viewport tag validator.

What does the report leave unmeasured?#

The page does not publish a request count for the device split, so the sample can only be described as all 2025 requests on Cloudflare’s network. The passage does not say how automated traffic or tablets are treated, so neither should be assumed. Cloudflare’s separate finding that iOS devices produced 35% of mobile device traffic is a share of mobile only, not of all requests.