Age checks are doing some of what they were supposed to do. Ofcom says more children now encounter proper checks when asked to prove their age, with the proportion rising from 25% in July 2025 to 43% by January 2026. A sample of 32 online services completed more than 69 million checks between July and December 2025, 23 times the number recorded during the previous six months.
The clearest evidence comes from porn sites. Eight per cent of the 8 to 14-year-olds monitored by Ofcom visited at least one, but half only reached services with age checks in place. Nearly nine out of ten visits lasted less than 30 seconds, while almost two-thirds ended within ten seconds. Ofcom believes many children were quickly moving between sites in search of one they could enter.
All ten of the UK’s most frequently visited porn services now use age checks, along with 64 of the top 100. Another ten have blocked UK visitors altogether. Ofcom has opened 23 investigations covering 88 adult services, with almost three-quarters subsequently introducing checks or leaving the UK market. Seven providers operating 24 sites have already been fined.
Image credit: Ofcom
Ofcom offices in London, photographed from the bridge
Search engines are pointing children towards the gaps
Ofcom’s logged-out test searches found that 33% of results on Google’s first page led to porn sites without age checks or other protections. On Bing, the figure reached 54%. Among children who visited porn services during Ofcom’s study, 62% had used a search engine immediately beforehand on at least one occasion. Google and Bing have now agreed to work with the regulator on ways to make those sites harder to find.
Social media has a different problem. Some platforms use age inference, which studies your activity and behaviour before estimating whether you’re a child or an adult. Ofcom doubts that these systems identify enough children reliably and has opened a formal investigation into TikTok’s approach. Dating apps aren’t getting a clean bill of health either: more than one in ten 15 to 17-year-olds continued using three of the most popular services despite their age checks.
Those shortcomings become harder to ignore with an under-16 social media ban planned for 2027. Age inference only works after somebody has opened an account and generated enough activity to analyse, making it unsuitable for stopping children at the door. Ofcom will report to Parliament by the end of October on which checks could enforce the ban, followed by a separate report on app-store protections in January 2027.
