Cloudflare on October 8, 2026 detailed a rebuild of the landing page of Radar, its free public site for Internet measurements, swapping a grid of chart widgets for a world map with tabs beneath it, according to a blog post by Sophia Alfred and Lai Yi Ohlsen.

In Short

Cloudflare rearranged the front page of Radar, its free website for watching how the Internet behaves, so that a world map comes first and the charts sit behind tabs instead of filling one crowded grid. The change matters to anyone who reads Radar's numbers, from network engineers to journalists and marketers, because Cloudflare says the old page was hard for newcomers to read and that one user struggled to show it to students. The post describes changes to layout, branding and components rather than to the data underneath, so in practice what shifts is which figures a visitor meets first - outages and traffic - and how the rest opens up.

What the post describes

The post, filed under the tags Front End, Internship Experience and Radar, is billed as a five-minute read. According to Cloudflare, Radar gives "a real-time view into global Internet trends" and has run since 2020. PPC Land reported the launch on October 5, 2020, describing a free dashboard with data for the last hour, the last 24 hours and the last seven days, and relaying Cloudflare's statement that 1 billion unique IP addresses connected to its network.

By Cloudflare's account, Radar has found its natural audience among expert users with technical backgrounds, such as network operators and academic researchers who follow industry trends and global events. The company wants journalists, human rights advocates, policymakers and everyday users to come too, and describes a wider audience as "a core part of our vision". The question it set itself was how to make Radar more approachable without giving up depth and rigor.

A world map in the top section

The new landing page opens with a map. Because Radar helps people understand Internet activity across countries and regions, Cloudflare says a map was "the clearest way" to make that scope visible at once. The post adds that the Internet in many ways operates outside national borders, yet its relevance to daily life is often best understood through geography.

The top section of the page covers two themes, traffic and outages. Why open with outages? Cloudflare's answer rests on three adjectives: they are among the "concrete, timely, and salient" data points about the state of the Internet. Traffic, by contrast, conveys the scale and breadth of Radar's data. The map also serves as an entry point, steering visitors from the global picture into particular countries, trends and what the post calls data stories.

Tabs in place of the bento box grid

Below the map, Cloudflare turned the old bento box chart widgets into a tabbed flow meant to move visitors through the data more deliberately. Each tab carries summary statistics that signal what Radar can do, along with a call to action that leads into the full data. In Cloudflare's telling, the structure sets a clearer hierarchy, stops the page feeling overwhelming and previews the range of information on offer. The post does not list the tabs or say which datasets each one holds.

Why Cloudflare says the old page fell short

According to Cloudflare, the earlier landing page succeeded in showing the breadth of Radar's data, but the presentation made it hard to parse, for three reasons. The bento box layout gave everything similar visual weight. Vertical cards disrupted natural reading patterns. And the styling felt disconnected from Cloudflare's broader brand.

User feedback figures in the account. One external user named, as one of his biggest frustrations, that Radar was "difficult to show to his students". Cloudflare took the comment as confirmation that Radar could "feel intimidating" to people meeting it for the first time.

Branding carried its own argument. For external users, the post says, consistency "directly affects trust and usability", and a more cohesive Cloudflare experience helps signal that Radar is an authoritative source, while familiar layout patterns reduce the effort needed to move through complex information. The evidence offered for the diagnosis is thin: a single user's remark and the team's own assessment. The post cites no survey, no analytics and no before-and-after measurements.

Three design pillars and a component migration

To build a design language, the team looked across Cloudflare's content ecosystem and sorted it into three pillars: marketing pages, such as cloudflare.com; content experiences, such as the Cloudflare Blog and Developer Docs; and product experiences. Radar, it concluded, sits at the intersection of all three - at its core a data product, yet public-facing and "inherently content-rich".

The resulting strategy borrows something from each. Marketing supplies approachability, content supplies structure and navigation, and the product side supplies maintainability, through a migration to Kumo components used by Cloudflare's product system. That is all the post says about Kumo. No component count, framework, timetable or completion status appears, so the scale of the migration cannot be judged from the text.

Two map versions set aside

The map went through "many rounds of iteration" as the team tried to balance data richness against approachability. Early versions were "too dense", an attempt to convey credibility through data-heavy visuals. Later ones leaned into marketing-style visuals; they felt friendlier but risked making fresh data seem "static or overly summarized". The shipped version sits between the two poles and has, in Cloudflare's words, "the feel of live data, but it's easier to read". The post does not say how often the map's figures refresh, or what "live" means in practice.

The direction Cloudflare describes

The post closes with a statement of intent. Because Cloudflare sits in front of roughly a fifth of all web traffic, it says, Radar has the opportunity to tell unique stories about the Internet, and the company wants every user to have real-time insights across security, performance and traffic. The overhaul is called a "foundational step" and a first move toward a "more intuitive, scannable Radar". Future work will concentrate on tools, visualizations and storytelling frameworks that remove friction for new audiences while "doubling down" on the data infrastructure. No dates are attached.

Feedback is invited through @CloudflareRadar on X, radar.cloudflare.com on Bluesky and radar@cloudflare.com. The authors ask what is working, what is not, and which insights remain hard to uncover.

What Radar covers, and how the catalogue has grown

Cloudflare's developer documentation describes Radar as a hub for global Internet traffic, attacks and technology trends, powered by data from Cloudflare's network and by aggregated, anonymized data from its 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. According to the same documentation, the Radar API is free, and data from its endpoints is released under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, a non-commercial license.

The catalogue the landing page has to front is far wider than the dashboard PPC Land described in 2020. In September 2024, Cloudflare added a Radar dashboard for TCP connection anomalies - connections that reset or time out within the first 10 ingress packets - which it put at about a fifth of new connections. On October 27, 2025 came TLD insights, covering more than 1,400 top-level domains ranked by DNS Magnitude, a 0-to-10 score based on the number of unique client networks rather than raw query counts. And on April 17, 2026, according to Cloudflare's changelog, the AI Insights page gained a widget tracking adoption of AI agent standards, a gauge showing the median response-size saving from serving Markdown instead of HTML to AI bots and crawlers, and a chart of the HTTP response status codes returned to those bots.

Where Radar's figures surface in marketing coverage

For marketers and publishers, Radar matters chiefly as a source of citable numbers. PPC Land's coverage of AI crawlers, bot traffic and outages has returned to Cloudflare data repeatedly.

On bots, Cloudflare's 2025 Year in Review, covered by PPC Land on December 20, 2025, put AI bots at 4.2% of HTML requests and traffic growth at 19% for the year. Cloudflare counts Googlebot separately because it crawls for both search indexing and AI training; on its own, the review shows, it accounted for 4.5% of HTML requests. The same review found AI crawlers to be the user agents most often fully disallowed in robots.txt files. By early June 2026, Radar data cited in PPC Land's coverage of Cloudflare's shift to paying publishers per AI answer showed bots at 57.4% of HTML traffic, and by September PPC Land was reporting Cloudflare data that placed bots and agents beyond half of all web requests.

The crawl-to-refer ratio compares a platform's crawl requests with the referral traffic it sends back to sites, and Cloudflare's blog post introducing the metric says it appears on the AI Insights page of Radar. Data released on August 29, 2025 put Anthropic at 38,000 pages crawled per referred visit in July 2025 and OpenAI at 1,091.

On outages, the order of the new landing page has a data record behind it. Cloudflare's 2025 review counted 174 outages, among them 83 government-directed shutdowns, 25 power failures and 19 cable cuts. In the second quarter of 2025, government-directed shutdowns returned after none in the first, and Portugal's April 28 power outage cut traffic by about half at first. On January 8, 2026, Radar data showed Iran's traffic falling nearly 90% within 30 minutes from about 16:30 UTC.

A final wrinkle concerns the figure that frames the post's closing argument. Cloudflare, which operates a CDN, says it sits in front of roughly a fifth of all web traffic. PPC Land's coverage of a Cloudflare pilot with OpenAI has the company saying it sits behind more than a fifth of the web, while W3Techs data cited by PPC Land in its CDN explainer put Cloudflare in front of around a fifth of all websites in November 2025. The three statements use different denominators - traffic, the web at large and sites - and the post does not define which it means.

What the post leaves open

Several gaps stand out. The post gives no date for when the new landing page went live, or whether it has replaced the earlier page for all visitors. It offers no usage figures, whether visits, time on page or task completion, against which the change could be judged. It does not name the tabs, so where datasets such as the AI bot figures sit relative to the map is unstated, and it is silent on whether the underlying data coverage changes. The Kumo migration is mentioned without scope.

Does a map-first page alter which numbers readers meet first, and therefore which ones get cited? The post offers no measurement either way. What it does provide is a statement of intent: a data product built first for network operators and researchers is being reshaped for readers who arrive without a technical background, with outages and traffic placed at the top. Cloudflare calls the work a first step and says it is "just getting started", though no later steps are scheduled in the text.

Timeline

Summary

  • Who: Cloudflare, through blog authors Sophia Alfred and Lai Yi Ohlsen, writing about Radar, its public Internet-measurement site, whose readers range from network operators and academic researchers to journalists, human rights advocates and policymakers.
  • What: A rebuilt Radar landing page that puts a world map and an outages-and-traffic section first, replaces the bento box widget grid with tabs of summary statistics, and moves styling toward Cloudflare's wider design language, with a migration to Kumo components.
  • When: The post is dated October 8, 2026. Radar itself has run since 2020.
  • Where: On Cloudflare's blog and on Radar's landing page at radar.cloudflare.com.
  • Why: Cloudflare says the earlier page was hard to parse and could feel intimidating to first-time visitors, and it wants Radar to reach broader audiences without losing depth, building on its position in front of roughly a fifth of all web traffic.