Pornhub says the number of UK visitors has fallen by 77% since the introduction of age tests

Pornhub says the number of visitors to its UK website has fallen by 77% compared to July, when stricter age checks for sexually explicit sites were introduced under the Internet Safety Act.

It claims that sites that ignore the new requirements benefit.

The BBC has been unable to independently verify Pornhub’s claim – however, data from Google shows that searches for the site have fallen by almost half since the law came into effect.

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

Pornhub is the most visited porn site in the world – and the 19th most visited on the entire web. According to Sameweb data.

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

The company’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 effect.

According to Ofcom, visits to porn sites overall in the UK have fallen by almost a third in the three months since 25 July.

The regulatory body said the new law achieves its primary purpose of preventing children from “easily stumbling upon pornographic material without searching for it.”

The watchdog said: “Our new rules end the era of the internet not targeting older people, when many sites and apps did not conduct meaningful checks to see if children were using their services.”

Ofcom told the BBC that it believed the number of people using VPNs for public use reached 1.5 million a day in July, after the law was passed, but had since fallen to around one million people.

Meanwhile, Research by Cybernews More than 10.7 million VPN app downloads were counted in the UK from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store during 2025.

“It’s possible that people who don’t want to verify their age or identity to access sexual content, for example due to privacy concerns, are using VPNs to get around this,” Dr Hanne Stegemann from the University of Exeter told the BBC.

“Because the location of website visitors is typically determined by IP addresses, these numbers may be inaccurate when a portion of visitors use VPNs.”

“We can do” using VPNs, Aras Nazarovas, an information security researcher at Cybernews, told the BBC in the UK.

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

“So part of Pornhub’s lost UK audience isn’t going away – it’s being reclassified as non-UK traffic.”

But he said he believed “the rest” was actually “users switching to sites that don’t require age verification.”

Alex Kekesi, CEO of Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, told the BBC that the new rules were unenforceable.

She said Ofcom faced an “insurmountable task” in trying to persuade an estimated 240,000 adult platforms – visited by eight million users a month in the UK – to follow the rules.

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

Ofcom says it prioritizes sites to be checked based on how dangerous they are and how many users they use.

Ms Kekesi claimed that some porn sites profited from flouting the rules. The BBC has not independently verified this.

She said: “There are a number of sites whose traffic has increased significantly, and these are non-compliant sites.”

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

She told the BBC about one ad that appeared to encourage users to search for content featuring girls under the age of consent.

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

The regulator defended the way it enforces the new rules, saying increased traffic to sites could be one of the factors triggering the investigation.

She told BBC News: “Sites that do not comply and put children at risk can expect to face enforcement action.”

Ofcom data shows that the top 10 most popular sites all have a lifetime guarantee. These sites account for a quarter of all visits to adult sites from across the UK.

He adds that more than three-quarters of daily traffic to the top 100 most popular sites goes to sites that have a lifetime guarantee.

The government also defended the regulator, saying protecting children online was a “top priority” for ministers.

She added in a statement: “When evidence shows that more intervention is needed to protect children, we will not hesitate to act.”

Ms Kekesi spoke to the BBC while in the UK for a meeting with Ofcom and government officials, where she laid out Pornhub’s view that age verification should be done at a device level, rather than through individual websites.

She said the UK stands out in convincing the platform to introduce age tests.

A number of jurisdictions have sought to force Pornhub to verify the ages of its users, but the site has responded by banning users rather than complying.

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 verifications – that did not require the collection of biometric data.

It denied that the threat of heavy fines in the event of non-compliance was the main driver for compliance, pointing to the contrast with France – its second-largest market – where it blocked access rather than agreeing to what regulators demanded.

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

But he added that the group shared a desire to “level the playing field” which meant age verification processes should be “robust and not superficial or false”.

Chelsea Garvey, founder of a cybersecurity company who was researching age-assurance methods for her PhD at the University of Strathclyde, told the BBC that both approaches to age verification would be needed – with age verification on platforms or devices not being seen as a “silver bullet”.

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