Major porn sites have experienced huge dips in UK user traffic, following new tougher age verification rules being implemented in the country from July 25, 2025.
Data from analytics company Similarweb shows that Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest porn sites, lost over one million visitors in two weeks following the site’s introduction of more stringent age verification for UK users.
Between July 24 and August 8 Pornhub experienced a 47 percent decrease in UK traffic, with its UK daily visits number dropping from 3.6 million to 1.9 million. XVideos, another porn site, also saw a 47 percent decrease in UK user traffic over the same time period.
UK user traffic for xHamster (logo pictured above), another major porn site, fell by 39 percent over the same period.
Sites and platforms that create porn or allow porn to be shared have been compelled to implement robust age verification checks for UK users, to ensure that minors don’t access explicit content. Major porn sites have introduced measures such as email, credit card and face-scanning verification for users, and many sites now don’t show porn on their homepages before age verification takes place.
The new laws have been brought in as part of the UK government’s Online Safety Act and are being implemented by communications regulator Ofcom. Concerns about how the Act might disadvantage independent sites have been raised, as well as concerns about user data and privacy.
It is relatively simple to bypass UK age verification checks, by using a virtual proxy network (VPN) on your device to ‘trick’ the device into acting like it’s operating in a different region. VPN downloads surged in the UK after July 25, with VPNs topping download charts.
Similarweb’s data showed that UK traffic for some smaller and less well-regulated porn sites increased after the July 25 law changes. Critics of the Online Safety Act have said that some porn users may be pushed to ‘darker’ corners of the internet by major porn sites implementing more rigid age checks.
Pornhub said: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”
Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, has recently blocked access to its porn sites in some countries and regions, notably many US states, saying that local age verification rules can’t be complied with.
However, Aylo said that the new UK rules were “robust” and that it would be complying with them to keep its porn sites accessible after age checks.
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