IPv6 Growth Driven by Major Cloud Providers, Not Individual Sites
New data shows half of web hosts support IPv6, but most gains come from shared cloud infrastructure rather than independent site owners.
Key points
- 54.27% of measured hosts now support IPv6, up from 50.14% in March 2025.
- Growth is largely driven by default settings in major cloud and email providers.
- Email services saw the biggest increase, gaining 12.92 percentage points since 2022.
Internet Society researchers reported on September 22 that IPv6 adoption is rising. However, the growth is concentrated among a few large infrastructure providers. This means many websites gain support without their owners actively configuring it.
The analysis covers over five million hosts. While the overall percentage of dual-stack sites has increased, the source of that increase matters. It reflects the capabilities of shared platforms like Cloudflare and Google Cloud, not necessarily the specific actions of individual domain owners.
Provider defaults drive the statistical rise
According to CircleID, the latest crawl found 54.27% of hosts support both IPv4 and IPv6. This is up from 50.14% in March 2025. The remaining 45.73% still rely solely on the older IPv4 standard.
Major hosting platforms and content delivery networks offer IPv6 by default. Customers on these services get the upgrade automatically. This creates a situation where the global adoption rate looks high, but the actual work is done by a small group of vendors.
Mail services show the strongest gains
IPv6 coverage varies by service type. Email services saw the largest jump since January 2022, gaining 12.92 percentage points. This growth is largely due to migration toward Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
In March, 64.71% of high-ranking domains had IPv6 on at least one nameserver. Web services lagged behind at 30.06%. Mail services reached 32.85%. The concentration in a few large email providers makes broad comparisons difficult.
Data gaps limit country-level analysis
The current dataset lacks detailed country-level comparisons. Researchers note that ASN-level figures are not available in the summary data. This prevents a direct look at how individual countries are performing relative to one another.
The Internet Society UK Chapter plans a crawler update to improve this. Until then, the data supports service-level comparisons better than regional ones. The high global percentage may obscure who is actually doing the deployment work.
