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Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare
A content delivery network sits in front of a website. Requests hit the CDN's edge servers first, which serve cached content, terminate TLS, filter traffic, and pass the rest back to the origin. That means the CDN is a shared dependency: if it goes down, every site behind it goes down together, whether or not those sites have anything else in common.
I went through CipherCue's tracked European companies to see which CDN fronts their websites. Of the 44,143 companies where we detected a CDN at all, 39,547 are behind Cloudflare. That is 89.6%.
For a reference point, W3Techs put Cloudflare at 84.1% of sites where the reverse proxy provider can be identified, as of 28 July 2026 (w3techs.com). Our 89.6% is measured the same way, as a share of the identified set rather than of all sites, so the two are close; the European cut here runs a little higher.
I only counted companies that actually run a CDN. If a company serves its site straight from its own origin, it is not in these numbers at all. So this is not "Cloudflare vs the entire web"; it is who the CDN users went with.
The four CDN vendors we classify, counted as distinct companies where each was detected:
Amazon is second at 3,112, but that number needs a caveat. We detect Amazon through CloudFront, and Amazon is also a general cloud host, so some of these are companies whose origin happens to sit on AWS rather than companies that deliberately chose CloudFront as their front door. Fastly does not have that ambiguity. It is a pure CDN, and it comes third at 1,299, which is roughly one company for every thirty behind Cloudflare. Akamai, the oldest name in the category, is fourth at 396.
The raw counts add up to more than 44,143 because a company can sit behind more than one vendor and is counted under each (a Fastly front door with an AWS origin, say). That double counting pads the smaller vendors' totals, not Cloudflare's share, which is measured against the whole CDN-using set.
Rolling eight countries into one figure hides the differences between them, so here is the same measurement per country. Cloudflare is the majority front door in all of them, but the share ranges from about four in five in Spain and Ireland to about nineteen in twenty in the Netherlands.
The UK has the largest absolute count, 15,846 CDN-using companies behind Cloudflare in one market. Germany is the lowest of the big markets at 81.4%, which is still four in five.
Part of why a company buys a CDN is resilience, and one advantage of independent suppliers is that they fail independently. That advantage disappears when most of a market is behind the same supplier. An incident there is no longer one company's outage; it is most of the market's outage, on the same afternoon.