Cloudflare fronts 89.6% of CDN-using European companies in CipherCue dataset

Cloudflare was detected in front of 39,547 of 44,143 European companies using a recognised content delivery network, according to infrastructure research from CipherCue. That equates to 89.6% of the tracked cohort, which covers companies in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Italy, Spain and Ireland.

The figure measures only companies where CipherCue identified a CDN through HTTP fingerprinting and DNS observations as of 7 September 2026. Businesses serving websites directly from their own origin are excluded, and the dataset is not a census of European companies. It also skews towards small and mid-sized businesses rather than large enterprises.

Cloudflare was the majority provider in all eight markets. Its share ranged from about four-fifths in Spain and Ireland to roughly 95% in the Netherlands, while Germany recorded the lowest share among the major markets at 81.4%. The UK had the largest absolute count, with 15,846 tracked CDN-using companies detected behind Cloudflare.

Amazon/CloudFront was the second-most detected provider, with 3,112 companies, followed by Fastly with 1,299 and Akamai with 396. CipherCue cautioned that Amazon’s figure may include websites hosted on AWS rather than companies deliberately using CloudFront. Companies detected behind multiple vendors are counted under each provider, so vendor totals exceed the overall cohort.

CipherCue said concentration creates a shared dependency because a CDN sits between users and a website’s origin, handling functions including caching, TLS termination and traffic filtering. It linked the risk to three Cloudflare incidents during the previous 15 months, which Cloudflare attributed to internal operational errors rather than attacks. The findings do not indicate where companies store or process data, which depends on their origin infrastructure and back-end providers.