Facebook is now more popular than TikTok in Kenya, as more internet consumers have shifted to the Meta-owned social media platform, lured by its strategic crossover to emphasise video content, primarily through the massively popular short-form videos.
The 21-year-old social media platform jumped one place to become the country’s second-most visited internet platform in 2025, according to data from the web infrastructure provider and traffic monitor Cloudflare. TikTok held the top position in 2024.
Google remained Kenya’s most popular internet platform. In contrast, Microsoft and YouTube, which were the fourth and fifth most popular services among Kenyans in 2024, respectively, lost their positions to Instagram and WhatsApp.
X’s popularity in Kenya has declined, and the platform formerly known as Twitter has dropped from being the sixth most popular service last year to being excluded from the top 10 altogether.
“On social media, after the juggernauts Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, Snapchat is now outperforming X,” Cloudflare said.
TikTok launched globally in 2018. The Chinese short-video-sharing platform’s popularity grew from 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, driven by video trends and viral challenges among popular content creators.
Facebook’s parent Meta then introduced short-form videos dubbed ‘Reels’ on Instagram in 2020 and later brought them to Facebook to compete with TikTok.
The company has since adjusted its algorithms to prioritise Reels in users' feeds and made all videos on Facebook ‘Reels’ to create a full-screen vertical video design similar to TikTok's interface.
Facebook has also been moving away from a friends-and-family-first News Feed to algorithm-driven content recommendations, including videos, from accounts users don't follow, based on their interests.
This mimics TikTok's highly personalised ‘For You’ page algorithm, which has been key to its user engagement.
Globally, Cloudflare data shows that Google was the most popular service, ahead of Facebook and Apple, similar to last year.
TikTok slipped from fourth position last year to eighth in 2025.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was Kenya’s most widely used generative AI platform, followed by QuillBot, GitHub Copilot, DeepSeek, and Windsurf AI.
AI platforms are changing how Kenyans look for information online.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI, for the first time, was among the country’s top search engines at the fifth position, with 0.5 percent of all search traffic.
Google led with 94.6 percent, followed by Microsoft’s Bing (3.2 percent) and Brave (0.7 percent).
For Google, which dominates search engine traffic globally, this was a drop: last year, the company accounted for 97 percent of Kenya’s traffic. The 2025 traffic on Bing grew from 2.4percent last year, while Brave’s increased from 0.3 percent.
At the same time, mobile devices such as phones and tablets are increasingly replacing computers for browsing.
Cloudflare data shows mobile devices accounted for 52 percent of Kenya’s web traffic in 2025, up from 449 percent last year and 5.4 percent in 2023.
In contrast, desktop traffic in 2025 stood at 48 percent, down from 51 percent last year and 54.5 percent in 2023.
Android devices still account for most of Kenya’s internet traffic at 92 percent, compared to Apple’s iOS devices (7.6 percent).
Even so, Apple iPhones and iPads are on the rise from last year, when they made up 5.8 percent of internet browsing compared to 94 percent on Android devices like Samsung and Nokia.
