( CNN ) -- Everyone knows Google is big . But the truth is that it 's huge . On an average day , Google accounts for about 25 percent of all consumer internet traffic running through North American ISPs . That 's a far larger slice of than previously thought , and it means that with so many consumer devices connecting to Google each day , it 's bigger than Facebook , Netflix , and Instagram combined . It also explains why Google is building data centers as fast as it possibly can . Three years ago , the company 's services accounted for about 6 percent of the internet 's traffic . `` What 's really interesting is , over just the past year , how pervasive Google has become , not just in Google data centers , but throughout the North American internet , '' says Craig Labovitz , founder of Deepfield , the internet monitoring company that crunched the data . His probes show that more than 62 percent of the smartphones , laptops , video streamers , and other devices that tap into the internet from throughout North America connect to Google at least once a day . Labovitz calls Google 's traffic `` astounding . '' The lion 's share of it comes from YouTube . But Google traffic involving search , analytics , web apps , and advertising is far from insignificant . Take these numbers with a grain of salt , though . It 's impossible to get a total picture of the internet , so Deepfield 's numbers are a best guess based on the traffic flowing through its internet service provider partners . Still , there 's no question that Google is big and getting massive . To handle its growth , Google has been on a building binge . It now has data centers on four continents . All this work has been getting a lot of attention . But the tech titan is also hip-deep in another type of build-out , one that 's largely gone under the radar . Google has added thousands of servers — called Google Global Cache servers — to ISPs around the world . These servers store the most popular content from Google 's network — a YouTube video that 's going viral right now or apps from the Android marketplace , for example — then serve it directly from the ISP 's data center , rather than streaming it all the way from Google 's data center . These servers were in a handful of North American ISPs three years ago . Today , they 're in 80 percent of them , Labovitiz says . Companies like Akamai and Level 3 have been doing this type of caching for years . It helps speed up popular pages on websites like WIRED . But lately some big websites have started cutting content delivery deals directly with ISPs . It 's a strategy that Netflix very publicly embraced just over a year ago , but one that Google is much more reluctant to discuss . The company declined to comment for this story , and ISPs that use the Google Global Cache servers are n't allowed to talk about them . That 's not a huge surprise . Google does some pretty amazing things behind the scenes , and while it 's considered to be the world 's leader in infrastructure magic , it generally considers this work to be a closely held proprietary secret . Still , Netflix and Google 's move into so many of the ISP network operations centers that are just a few miles from its customers — what networking geeks call the `` edge '' of the network — is likely to be followed by other internet giants such as Apple and Facebook , Labovitz believes . `` It used to be that the focus of people like Google and Facebook was about building data centers , '' he says . `` They 're still doing that , but what is equally interesting is watching these edge boxes — these servers being embedded just everywhere . '' This article originally appeared on WIRED . Subscribe to WIRED magazine for less than $ 1 an issue and get a FREE GIFT ! Click here ! Copyright 2011 Wired.com .
Google accounts for 25 % of all Internet traffic in North America , according to a new report . That 's more than Facebook , Netflix and Twitter combined . Analytics say that 's a big jump from 6 % three years ago .