Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly reported their Q3 2025 earnings recently, and the results confirm a definitive shift in the digital landscape. While these three remain the “Big Three” public CDNs, they are no more pure-play CDNs than Coreweave is a simple “neocloud.”
All three have evolved significantly; content delivery is now just one service in a much broader, sophisticated portfolio. To understand how the industry is moving, we have analyzed the emerging patterns within their quarterly reports.
Here are the key highlights from the Q3 2025 earnings cycle.
2025 Revenue Performance
| Company | Q1 2025 Revenue | Q2 2025 Revenue | Q3 2025 Revenue |
| Akamai | $1.020 Billion | $1.043 Billion | $1.055 Billion |
| Cloudflare | $479.1 Million | $512.3 Million | $562.0 Million |
| Fastly | $144.5 Million | $148.7 Million | $158.2 Million |
1. The Pivot to “AI Middleware”
The most aggressive shift in 2025 is the repositioning of edge networks as “AI Gateways.” The industry is becoming the “Edge Intelligence” layer that sits between users and Large Language Models (LLMs).
- The Strategy: CDNs are betting that enterprises want to avoid sending every AI request back to a centralized hyperscaler (like AWS or GCP) due to high costs and latency.
- Akamai’s Play: They introduced the AI Gateway and Firewall for AI, specifically designed to handle “business logic” at the edge. Their goal is to solve the three major hurdles of LLMs: latency, security (blocking prompt abuse), and operational cost.
- Cloudflare & Fastly: Both peers have synced with this trend, focusing on Inference at the Edge. Cloudflare noted that “human eyeball traffic” is no longer the sole currency of the internet; the focus is now on the “agentic internet” and serving AI-driven requests.
2. The “Hyperscaler Clawback” and Declining Video Revenue
While the decline in CDN video delivery revenue isn’t a new phenomenon, Q3 2025 highlights a structural acceleration of this trend.
- Self-Hosting by Giants: Major platforms (like Netflix and TikTok) are increasingly building their own internal delivery infrastructure or negotiating “bandwidth credits” that commoditize the service.
- Price Erosion: Even as traffic volumes “stabilize,” revenue continues to trend downward. For example, Akamai reported a 3-4% decline in delivery revenue this quarter.
- The Trend: Video is now a “cash cow” legacy business. These companies are harvesting delivery margins to fund their high-growth transitions into Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) and Security.
3. Policing the “Search Generative Experience” (SGE)
Google’s shift toward providing answers directly in search results (SGE) has created a double-edged sword for the industry.
- Loss of “Thin” Traffic: Traditional news and publishing sites are seeing fewer click-throughs for simple queries. This reduces the sheer volume of traditional object-caching revenue that CDNs once relied on.
- The Monetization Counter-Trend: To fight back, CDNs are launching tools to help publishers “police” their traffic. Akamai and Cloudflare have introduced advanced Bot and Abuse solutions specifically to block or charge AI models for scraping content.
- The Shift: CDNs are moving from delivering traffic to policing and monetizing it, turning a potential traffic loss into a security and compliance win.
4. Platform Consolidation and “Vendor Fatigue”
Enterprises are tired of managing a fragmented stack of dozens of different security and cloud vendors. In 2025, the winner is the provider that offers a unified “Security Platform.”
- Bundling is Back: Akamai highlighted several $15M–$20M deals where customers bundled Security, Compute, and Delivery into a single contract.
- Security Dominance: Growth is no longer driven by “speed,” but by “defense.” All three providers reported massive surges in API Security and Zero Trust. Akamai’s Zero Trust/API security segment grew an impressive 49% this year.
- The Trend: The “CDN” is now a security platform first. Customers are choosing these networks based on their ability to stop a ransomware attack or secure an API, rather than how fast they can load a JPEG.
Summary: Industry Trends Q3 2025
| Trend | Impact on CDNs | Outlook |
| GenAI Inference | High growth in “AI Gateway” and Edge compute products. | Positive |
| Media/Video | Revenue erosion due to self-hosting and commoditization. | Negative |
| API Security | Explosive demand as applications become more interconnected. | Positive |
| Web Traffic | Shift from serving human “eyeballs” to managing AI scrapers. | Neutral |
Conclusion: The Strategic Pivot to a “Neural” Internet
As we move toward 2026, the CDN industry has completed a profound three-year transformation. The Q3 2025 earnings reports from Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly signal that “delivery” is no longer the destination; it is merely the vehicle.
The clear takeaway for 2025 is that the internet’s architecture is becoming neural. By moving from a model of storing data to reasoning with it, these providers are positioning themselves as the indispensable middleware of the AI era. While they face headwinds in legacy video margins and shifting search behaviors, they are effectively trading old-world, high-volume traffic for new-world, high-value intelligence.
Key Summary for IT Leaders:
- Security is the new speed: Optimization is now measured by your ability to secure APIs and stop AI scrapers, not just page load times.
- Edge is the AI HQ: Look to your CDN partners for low-latency inference rather than sending every request to the central cloud.
- Platform over Point-Solutions: Expect more “bundled” offerings as these companies seek to solve the “vendor fatigue” problem by owning the entire edge stack.
The “Public CDNs” of 2024 have officially become the Edge Cloud Hyperscalers of 2025. Those who still view them as simple caching layers are missing the most important infrastructure shift of the decade.