Pornhub says that UK traffic to the site has fallen by 77 percent since new age verification laws were implemented as part of the Online Safety Act in July 2025.
Alex Kekesi, head of community and brand at Pornhub’s parent company Aylo, told the [paywall] Financial Times that company representatives met UK government representatives on the week beginning October 20, 2025. Aylo argued that the Act isn’t working because porn users are simply migrating from sites that implement age verification to sites that haven’t complied with the regulation.
Kekesi told the FT that her team was “honestly shocked” by Pornhub’s traffic decline in the UK. She added that Aylo hadn’t noticed a corresponding rise in traffic from VPN use driven by UK-based users seeking to circumnavigate the new verification processes.
After July, the number of daily active UK VPN users doubled to 1.5 million, before falling to around one million by the end of September, according to the UK communications regulatory body Ofcom.
“We’ve lost the traffic but these are not people that have stopped looking at porn overnight. They’re just going to other websites,” Kekesi said. “And the big problem is that we take good care of making sure that the content on our platforms is compliant, is legal, is consensual. That is certainly not the case on these other platforms.”
Pornhub lost over one million visitors in the two weeks after the UK age verification rules kicked in, on July 25, 2025. At that time some smaller, less well-regulated porn sites saw traffic increase.
Aylo campaigns for age verification for porn access to be done at device-level rather than being the responsibility of sites. However, the company said that Ofcom’s implementation model was “robust”, and that its sites would comply with it by introducing new age verification systems.
Since July Ofcom has launched investigations into various porn sites and porn-related apps, including some smaller porn sites it says have not brought in sufficient age verification processes.
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