Google Now Accounts for at Least 6.4% of Web Traffic

Everyone knows that Google is huge in terms of internet traffic. Interestingly enough, it's getting bigger and faster than the rest of the web. Google now represents at least 6.4 percent of all internet traffic.

"This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record — gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January. If Google were an ISP, as of this month it would rank as the second largest carrier on the planet," Arbor Networks reports.

"Only one global tier1 provider still carries more traffic than Google (and this ISP also provides a large portion of Google’s transit)," it adds.

Granted, January 2010 was a low point for Google which had been losing market share for the last few months of 2009. But it's still the company's biggest month, both in absolute and relative numbers.

All of this while internet traffic continues to surge overall, the report estimates that traffic grows by 40 percent to 45 percent each year. Google continues to grow faster than the average.

"This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks," Arbor Networks explains.

The report shows that Google also has peering agreements with about 70 percent of the ISPs in the world. This means that traffic from Google websites has a direct path to the ISPs.

With Google accounting for such a large percentage of the web traffic, it can sign this type of agreements which favor both parties.

Arbor Networks gets its data from over 110 ISPs from around the world. While this means that there will be some inherent errors in the estimates, the company is confident that the numbers are representative for the internet at large.