https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c17n9k54qz2o BBC Homepage * Skip to content * Accessibility Help * Your account * Home * News * Sport * Earth * Reel * Worklife * Travel * Culture * Future * Music * TV * Weather * Sounds * More menu More menu Search BBC * Home * News * Sport * Earth * Reel * Worklife * Travel * Culture * Future * Music * TV * Weather * Sounds Close menu BBC News Menu * Home * Israel-Gaza war * War in Ukraine * Climate * Video * World * US & Canada * UK * Business * Tech More * Science * Entertainment & Arts * Health * In Pictures * BBC Verify * World News TV * Newsbeat * Tech Porn site traffic plummets as UK age verification rules enforced A man wearing a silver watch and denim shirt holds a white smartphone in his hands, his face is not visible nor is his screenImage source, Getty Images Charlotte Edwards & Chris Vallance Technology reporters * Published 13 August 2025, 16:44 BST Updated 6 hours ago The number of people in the UK visiting the most popular pornography sites has decreased sharply since enhanced age verification rules came into place, new figures indicate. Data analytics firm Similarweb said leading adult site Pornhub lost more than one million visitors in just two weeks. Pornhub and other major adult websites introduced advanced age checks on 25 July after the Online Safety Act said sites must make it harder for under-18s to see explicit material. Data experts at Similarweb compared the daily average user figures of popular pornography sites from 1 to 9 August with the daily average figures for July. Pornhub is the UK's most visited website for adult content and it experienced a 47% decrease in traffic between 24 July, one day before the new rules came into place, and 8 August, according to Similarweb's data. Over the same time period, traffic to XVideos, another leading adult site, was also down 47% and OnlyFans saw traffic drop by over 10%. The number of average daily visits to Pornhub fell from 3.2 million in July to 2 million in the first nine days of August. However, the data also showed that some smaller and less well regulated pornography sites saw visits increase. A spokesperson for Pornhub told the BBC: "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." The UK's new online safety rules, explained: * What is the Online Safety Act? * How could age checks for porn work in the UK? * From Reddit to Pornhub: Which sites will require UK age verification? * The debate: Will new rules for porn sites do more harm than good? This comes after Virtual private network (VPN) apps became the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK in the days after the age verification rules were enforced. VPNs can disguise your location online - allowing you to use the internet as though you are in another country. The apps would also make it harder to collect data on how many people are visiting sites from specific locations. Media regulator Ofcom estimates 14 million people watch online pornography. It has set out a number of ways websites can verify the age of users including through credit card checks, photo ID matching and estimating age using a selfie. Critics have suggested an unintended consequence of the changes could be to drive people to more extreme content in darker corners of the internet, such as the dark web. Get in touch Have you downloaded a VPN in response to the new rules? Are you a parent with a view on this legislation? Contact form Contact form More on this story * Ofcom investigates 34 porn sites over age checks + Published 31 July * What the Online Safety Act is - and how to keep children safe online + Published 24 July A green promotional banner with black squares and rectangles forming pixels, moving in from the right. The text says: "Tech Decoded: The world's biggest tech news in your inbox every Monday." 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