The UK’s Ofcom issues a report on age verification legislation

Almost a year after the passing of the UK’s age verification, Online Safety Act, Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has released a report on its progress.

The Internet Safety Act requires stricter age checks on sites with “adult-restricted” content, which ranges from pornography to potentially revealing content like the r/stopsmoking subreddit.

Age verification in the UK, one year later

Ofcom found that this age test is now being used at an “unprecedented rate” in a variety of areas: sex, social media, dating, and gaming. Between July 2025, when the law goes into effect, and Jan. 2026, the proportion of children “asked to indicate their age that met the most effective age test” increased from 25 percent to 43 percent.

Between July and December last year, 69 million annual inspections were completed with a sample of 32 services, which Ofcom said was a 23-fold increase in the previous six months.

According to Ofcom’s Children’s Passive Online Monitoring survey, eight per cent of children aged 8 to 14 who took part have visited pornography providers. Part of them only accessed age-restricted sites. The majority, 87 percent, of these porn site visits were less than 30 seconds, and 65 percent were less than 10 seconds.

Mistakes in Internet Security Law

Ofcom also found that all of the UK’s top ten porn sites, as well as 64 of the country’s 100 most popular porn sites, had an age guarantee installed as of last month, with 10 having UK users geo-blocked. Despite this, however, Ofcom said “many porn sites still do not have age checks.” It opened 23 investigations into 88 elderly service providers.

Another result of this report is that children are finding porn sites without age restrictions through searches. A third (33 percent) of Google search results on the first page were porn sites without age checks or geo-blocking, while this was the case for 54 percent of Bing’s first page results.

Ofcom said Google and Bing are working with it “to tackle the availability of porn sites without age checks on their services,” although the Internet Safety Act does not require search providers to use age verification to prevent children from viewing porn.

The report also said that more than 10 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds accessed three popular dating apps in Dec. 2025, without age checks, so these services need to ensure that their age checks work.

Finally, the report also casts doubt on age determination methods, which estimate a user’s age from their behavior.

“Our message to social media companies is clear: those who use age-revealing models to comply with their child protection duties should switch to alternatives listed in our guidelines as effective without delay,” Ofcom said in a press release shared with Mashable.

This will be more effective as the UK bans social media for children under the age of 16. The UK government plans to implement age verification measures similar to the Online Safety Act. A recent study on social media bans in Australia found it ineffective, in part because age ratings don’t require younger users to be screened more.

Ofcom says it will bring a review of what the “best working age test” would look like to determine whether someone is over 16 in Parliament by the end of Oct. It will also publish a report on store age verification in Jan. 2027.

In addition to a wider ban on social media for under-16s, the UK recently announced a social media curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds.