Pornhub says UK visitors down 77% since age checks came in

Pornhub says the number of visitors to its website in the UK is down 77% compared to July, when stricter age checks for explicit sites were introduced under the Online Safety Act.

He claims that sites that ignore the new requirements benefit from this.

The BBC was unable to independently verify Pornhub’s claim; However, data from Google shows that searches for the site have almost halved since the law came into effect.

This may be a result of people reducing their use of porn, but can also be partly explained by people visiting the site through alternative means, such as a VPN, which masks the user’s location.

Pornhub is the world’s most visited porn site and the 19th most visited site on the entire web. According to data from Zirveweb.

Under the OSA, anyone accessing such websites in the UK must now prove they are over 18 through age checks such as facial recognition.

The firm’s claim is the latest indication that people in the UK are changing the way they use the internet since the Online Safety Act came into force.

Visits to pornography sites overall in the UK have fallen by almost a third in the three months since July 25, according to Ofcom.

The regulator said the new law fulfilled its key aim of preventing children from “easily stumbling upon porn without looking for it”.

“Our new rules end the age of age-blind internet, where many sites and apps did not make meaningful checks to see if children were using their services,” the watchdog said.

Ofcom told the BBC that it believed the number of people using VPNs for general use reached 1.5 million per day in July after the law came into force, but has since fallen to around a million.

Meanwhile, Cybernews’ research It counted more than 10.7 million downloads of VPN apps from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in the UK during 2025.

from the University of Exeter. “People who don’t want to verify their age or identity to access sexual content, for example due to privacy concerns, are probably using VPNs to get around this,” Hanne Stegeman told the BBC.

“Since the location of website visitors is often determined via IP addresses, these figures may be inaccurate if some of the visitors are using VPNs.”

Cybernews information security researcher Aras Nazarovas also told the BBC that people in the UK can and do use VPNs.

“VPN apps jumped to the top of the UK App Store after age checks were introduced, with at least one provider seeing a 1,800% increase in downloads,” he said.

“So some of Pornhub’s ‘lost’ UK audience hasn’t disappeared; it’s being reclassified as non-UK traffic.”

But he said he believed “the rest” were actually “users shifting to sites that do not require age checks.”

Alex Kekesi, an executive at Pornhub’s parent company Aylo, told the BBC the new rules were unenforceable.

He said Ofcom faced an “insurmountable task” in trying to ensure that an estimated 240,000 adult platforms in the UK, visited by eight million users a month, complied with the rules.

This compares with the regulator taking action against fewer than 70 facilities for non-compliance.

Ofcom says it prioritizes investigating sites based on how risky they are and the number of users they have.

And Ms Kekesi claimed some pornographic sites benefited from breaking the rules. The BBC has not independently confirmed this.

“There are a lot of sites whose traffic is increasing exponentially, and these are sites that are not following the rules,” he said.

Ms Kekesi also has concerns about the content of some of these sites.

He told the BBC about an app that encourages users to search for content featuring underage girls.

Aylo says it has shared details of this and other sites with Ofcom.

The regulator defended the way it implemented the new rules, saying increased traffic to the sites may have been one of the factors that triggered the investigation.

“Sites that do not comply with these rules and put children at risk may face enforcement,” he told BBC News.

Ofcom’s data shows age assurance is implemented on all 10 of the most popular sites. These sites represent a quarter of all visits to adult sites across the UK.

It is stated that more than three quarters of the daily traffic to the 100 most popular sites goes to sites with age assurance.

The government also defended the regulator and said protecting children online was a “number one priority” for ministers.

“We will not hesitate to take action where there is evidence that further intervention is necessary to protect children,” the statement said.

Ms Kekesi spoke to the BBC for a meeting with Ofcom and government officials in the UK; here he was voicing Pornhub’s argument that age checks should be done at the device level rather than on individual websites.

He said the UK stood out in persuading the platform to implement age checks.

Some jurisdictions have tried to force Pornhub to check the ages of its users, but the site’s response has been to block users rather than comply.

Ms Kekesi said the UK was different because it allowed sites to offer a range of different solutions, meaning Pornhub could use methods such as email-based checks that do not require biometric data collection.

He denied that the threat of heavy fines for non-compliance was the main reason for compliance, pointing to the contrast with France, its second-largest market, where regulators cut off access rather than acceding to its demands.

Ian Corby of the Association of Age Verification Providers has rejected calls for a switch to device-based verification.

But he added that the group shared the desire for a “level playing field”, meaning age checks should be “robust, not superficial or fake”.

Cybersecurity company founder Chelsea Jarvie, who is researching age assurance methods for her PhD at the University of Strathclyde, told the BBC that both approaches to age checks will be required; He said age verification on neither platforms nor devices is a “silver bullet.”

“For someone to be truly safe online, we need different layers of controls throughout their browsing journey,” he said.