Since the United Kingdom implemented age verification stricter access to explicit sexual content last July, under the Online Safety Act, traffic to pornographic websites has plummeted. Pornhub, the most visited adult site in the world, ensures that its visits from this country have decreased by 77%.
Massive traffic reduction. According to Ofcom, the British communications regulator, visits to sites with pornographic content generally have decreased by almost a third within three months after the law comes into force. Google shows that searches for Pornhub have dropped by about half since then.
The regulations require that anyone who accesses this type of website from the United Kingdom prove to be over 18 years old through verifications such as facial identification, email codes or credit card data. It must be taken into account that Pornhub is the nineteenth most visited website on the entire Internet, according to data from Similarweb, which gives dimension to the impact of these figures.
The VPN effect complicates measurements. The drop in traffic does not necessarily mean that Brits have stopped consuming pornographic content. And there is a tool that makes actual measurement difficult of traffic from the UK: VPNs. The UK has become one of the fastest growing VPN markets in the world. According to data According to Cybernews, in the first half of 2025, more than 10.7 million downloads of VPN applications were recorded in the country, a figure that is already close to 16.65 million for all of 2024.
Ofcom esteem that around a million people use VPN daily, tools that are especially useful for hiding the user’s real location and thus bypassing age controls. After the law came into force, VPN apps topped downloads in the British App Store, with at least one provider reporting an 1,800% increase in downloads. “It is likely that some of Pornhub’s ‘missing’ audience has not actually disappeared, but is being reclassified as non-British traffic,” explains Aras Nazarovas, cybersecurity researcher at Cybernews.
cunequal compliance. Alex Kekesi, director of Aylo, parent company of Pornhub, explains BBC that the new rules are “unenforceable” and that many platforms benefit from ignoring them. It notes that Ofcom faces an “insurmountable task” trying to enforce the rules on some 240,000 adult platforms, visited by eight million users a month in the UK, while the regulator has only taken action against fewer than 70 sites for non-compliance.
Kekesi assures that there are sites whose traffic “has grown exponentially” due to not complying with age verification, and has expressed concern about the content of some of these platforms, mentioning one that seemed to encourage searching for content with minors. Aylo affirms have shared information about these sites with Ofcom.
The defense of the regulator. Ofcom defend that prioritizes the investigation of sites according to their risk and number of users, and that the increase in traffic can be precisely one of the factors that triggers an investigation. The organism holds that the 10 most popular platforms already have verification systems in place, representing 25% of all visits to adult content from the United Kingdom.
The regulator also insists that more than three-quarters of the daily traffic to the 100 most visited websites goes to sites with age verification. “Sites that do not comply and put minors at risk can expect to face enforcement action,” he said. declared Ofcom. The regulator has launched investigations against 62 services suspected of ignoring the law.
The debate over where to check. Pornhub proposes that age verification be done at the device level instead of web by web, arguing that it would be more effective and better protect privacy. Kekesi, who has traveled to the United Kingdom to meet with Ofcom and government officials, stands out That the British country is an exception, since Pornhub has blocked access in other jurisdictions that required age verification, such as France, its second largest market.
The difference is that the United Kingdom allows sites to offer various verification methods, including email checks that do not require biometrics. However, experts such as Chelsea Jarvie, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Strathclyde, they explain to the BBC that “for someone to be truly safe online we need different layers of controls throughout their browsing,” noting that no single approach is a “silver bullet.”
The position of the British government. The authorities they have defended the regulator’s actions and have reaffirmed that protecting minors online is a “top priority” for ministers. “Where evidence shows that greater intervention is needed to protect minors, we will not hesitate to act,” the executive states.
Ofcom affirms that the new law is fulfilling its primary purpose of preventing children from being able to “easily stumble upon pornography without searching for it.” “Our new rules end the era of an age-blind internet, when many sites and apps did not carry out any meaningful check to see if minors were using their services,” the regulator says.
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