The UK's age verification push is working — partially.
About a year after the Online Safety Act took effect, Ofcom released its first substantive progress report. Between July and December 2025, 69 million age checks were completed across a sample of 32 services — a 23-fold increase from the prior six months. The share of children encountering what Ofcom calls "highly effective" age checks rose from 25 to 43 percent between July 2025 and January 2026. All of the UK's top 10 porn sites have now installed age assurance, though only 64 of the top 100 have done so, and Ofcom has opened 23 investigations into providers of 88 adult services.
The gaps matter as much as the gains. A third of first-page Google results for relevant searches returned porn sites without age checks; the figure was 54 percent on Bing. Ofcom says both companies are cooperating, but the law doesn't actually require search providers to enforce age gates — meaning the most common discovery path for minors is largely voluntary. Dating apps have a separate problem: more than 10 percent of 15 to 17-year-olds still accessed three popular platforms in December 2025 despite checks being in place.
Ofcom also took a pointed swipe at age-inference systems — tools that guess a user's age from behavior rather than checking identity — telling social media companies to ditch them in favor of methods it classifies as highly effective. That matters because the UK is preparing a broader under-16 social media ban using similar verification frameworks. Australia tried a comparable ban and researchers found it fell short partly because behavioral age estimation doesn't trigger extra checks for younger users.
Ofcom is due to deliver Parliament a definition of what "highly effective" over-16 verification looks like by the end of October — the standard the social media ban will likely depend on.