Cloudflare says it is now the fastest provider in 74% of the 1,000 largest networks worldwide, up from 60% in April 2026. The company attributes the 14-percentage-point gain to becoming fastest in an additional 150 of those networks and to ranking first in 38 more countries. The claim matters because connection speed shapes how quickly users reach applications, APIs, and websites, and because Cloudflare is using the update to introduce a new way of measuring that speed.
Cloudflare ranks providers by connection time, defined as the time a user’s device needs to complete a TCP handshake when requesting content. It starts from the 1,000 largest networks ranked by estimated user population using APNIC data, then calculates the trimean of connection times, a weighted average of the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles. The company says this method reduces the influence of outliers while still representing the range of experiences most users see.
The existing measurement system relies on Cloudflare-branded error pages, which have provided real-user performance data since 2021. When a user reaches such a page, the browser can run a background measurement that fetches lightweight files from Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Google, Fastly, and Akamai, recording how long each connection takes from that user’s browser, network, and moment. Cloudflare says this captures performance under real internet conditions rather than in controlled test environments.
Since the April update, Cloudflare has added measurements from Cloudflare Challenge Pages, the full-page screens that verify visitors before they reach a website. Challenge Pages are delivered by Cloudflare Turnstile and are typically triggered by a Web Application Firewall rule. While a visitor is on a Challenge Page, a small, non-interactive measurement runs in the background, fetching lightweight files from the same fixed set of endpoints and recording whether each request completed and how long it took. Cloudflare says the measurement is designed not to add noticeable latency and to preserve Turnstile’s privacy properties.
For now, Cloudflare is running these measurements on only a small fraction of eligible free Challenge Pages, alongside continued collection from error pages. The company says it will limit measurements to free Challenge Pages and will increase the sampling rate only if the additional data improves measurement quality and end-user performance remains unaffected. The main upgrade is reach: Challenge Pages let Cloudflare collect measurements during everyday interactions wherever a challenge is already being served, increasing data volume and the diversity of users, networks, and geographies.
Cloudflare says the initial Challenge Pages results are promising but early. The company wants to weight performance by the number of people who experience it, group results by country or worldwide instead of by network, and quantify how much of total user traffic its measured networks represent. It also says more measurements will narrow the confidence interval around each provider’s trimean, helping distinguish a genuine lead from statistical noise in networks where top providers are separated by only a millisecond or two, such as Cloudflare at 50 ms and Fastly at 51 ms. Cloudflare says the improvement coincides with the new methodology and that future movement in the rankings should reflect real changes in performance as the dataset grows.
