Major porn sites including Pornhub and xHamster have implemented new, tougher age verification processes for Australian users, but remain the country’s “biggest sources of online pornography”, according to newly-revealed government documents.
Briefing documents written by Australia’s eSafety commissioner showed that “90 percent of the most visited pornography websites in Australia” had introduced age assurance measures for site access, following laws toughening in March 2026. All of the five most popular porn sites in the country had launched age assurance processes.
Those five sites are Pornhub, Xhamster, XVideos, XNXX and Eporner.
Australian authorities have joined those in the UK and US by getting tough on sites not seen to be doing enough to keep minors away from porn. Critics of such crackdowns have claimed that authorities focusing on big sites like Pornhub could push porn-seekers to less regulated and potentially wilder corners of the internet.
The commissioner addressed that, saying there was “no evidence of traffic consolidation or migration to a single service beyond the top five sites”. They added that the popular sites were still the “biggest sources” of online porn in Australia, although it was suggested that they had seen drops in traffic since introducing tougher age assurance.
There aren’t currently any publicly-available official statistics about popular porn sites’ Australian traffic since the March law change. However, the commissioner wrote of a “drop in user numbers” among the biggest sites.
A traffic drop would be expected. Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, claimed that Pornhub’s UK traffic dropped by 77 percent after the country introduced tougher age verification laws in July 2025, alongside evidence that smaller, less compliant sites picked up traffic that major platforms lost.
Australia’s eSafety commissioner noting that big porn sites had introduced new assurance measures, and the allusion to drops in site traffic, could suggest that the new laws are working. Some of that drop will be minors, which is the stated point of the law. But without usage breakdowns, there’s no way to know what share of the missing traffic is actually underage users versus adults avoiding age checks, either because they can’t be bothered or because they have privacy concerns.
VPN days numbered?
Pornhub now only offers users in Australia free access to a ‘safe for work’ version of the site, an offering whose appeal is, to put it mildly, limited. You can still access the full explicit Pornhub site if you pay for it and go through age assurance to prove you’re eighteen or over.
It is, of course, still possible to bypass age assurance by using a VPN to make your device behave as if it’s in a different country or region. Australian authorities are looking at ways of closing this not insignificant loophole.
Australian VPN download figures rocketed in March after the age assurance laws kicked in. However, in the newly-released briefing notes, the commissioner said that it has “not observed peaks in VPN downloads that would solely account for the drop in user numbers across the top five [porn site] services in particular.”
Still, it’s clear that VPNs are being used in vast numbers to access porn, and the commissioner suggested that porn sites may shoulder more responsibility for them. The commissioner noted that “tech companies can tell when a VPN is in use”, and that under Australian compliance codes, sites have to “take reasonable steps to prevent workarounds like VPNs”.
The commissioner added that it will “look at this [VPN use] when considering compliance”.
The Australian eSafety commissioner’s stance on sites’ responsibilities regarding VPN use is further evidence that the days of the easy VPN workaround may be numbered.
In the US state Utah an online age verification amendments bill was recently passed, that placed focus on VPN use. It stated that a person is legally considered to be in Utah if they are physically located in the state, regardless of where their VPN is set to. This raises the prospect of sites being held responsible for allowing porn access to VPN users.
Aylo has sued the state of Utah, claiming that the bill amendment breaches constitutional restrictions on states legislating outside their borders. The stage could be being set for Australia to become the next VPN/porn battleground.
