Over the past few years, age verification (AV) has gone from a niche policy discussion to a very real, very immediate concern for anyone operating in the adult space. More than half of U.S. states now have laws on the books designed to prevent minors from accessing explicit material online, and numerous other states are weighing similar legislation. These laws require websites hosting a substantial portion of content deemed “harmful to minors” to verify each user’s age via methods such as government-issued IDs or biometric data.
A key turning point came in June 2025, when the Supreme Court decided the pivotal case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton by upholding Texas’ age verification law, HB 1181. The court’s ruling affirmed that states can compel websites to require proof of age before granting access to certain material, signaling a broader shift in expectations around anonymity and access across the internet.
While much of the early conversation around age verification (AV) focused on adult content platforms, the ripple effects have already been felt far beyond.
In a national survey conducted in March by the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, 73% of sex educators said they were concerned that AV laws will impact their work, and 76% feared that such laws could be used to restrict access to sex education and related resources. In states with AV laws currently in effect, 33% of sex educators said they believed that their work has already been affected.
Among sexual health professionals more broadly, 58% said they believed that AV laws could be used to restrict access to education and resources, while 53% said they believed the laws have already had an impact.
Echoing those concerns, industry attorney Lawrence Walters believes that it’s only a matter of time before enforcement efforts and lawsuits expand from digital adult content to target online pleasure product retailers as well.
“Nothing in these laws prevents their application to product retailers if the content on the sites fits the definitions in the statutes,” Walters says.
Pleasure brands, retailers and sex educators are therefore now asking a new set of questions: How will this impact customer trust? Will added barriers disrupt already sensitive purchase journeys? What does AV compliance look like in a space where discretion has always been part of the experience?
Adult Retail: The Next Target?
Industry attorney Corey D. Silverstein expects more states to pass AV laws, and notes that compliance expectations are becoming more operationally concrete rather than theoretical.
“Compared to a year ago, there’s less room to rely on constitutional uncertainty as a buffer,” Silverstein says. “Companies should now be actively implementing age-gating mechanisms where applicable, and documenting those efforts.”
Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection Executive Director Tim Henning warns, “Noncompliance in active states risks immediate attorney general lawsuits, daily fines and injunctions.”
To make matters worse, most of these statutes have unidirectional attorney’s fees provisions. That is, if the plaintiff prevails, they recover attorney’s fees. However, if the defendant prevails, the defendant does not recover attorney’s fees. In Tennessee and South Dakota, noncompliant site operators can even face criminal charges.
Because of such considerations, the general sentiment among industry stakeholders and observers is that it is always better to be safe than sorry. However, Henning does not see immediate peril on the horizon for pleasure product companies.
“Most pure pleasure product ecommerce sites are likely safe for now,” he says. “Courts have not applied these laws to typical sex-toy retailers. Separate 2025 Texas bills that aimed to require ID checks specifically for online sex-toy sales failed in the legislature. And pleasure retailers have mostly stayed under the radar by not triggering the threshold.”
The “threshold” is a common provision in state AV laws, which specifies that any website containing 33.3% or more of material harmful to minors must implement age-verification measures. Henning urges pleasure product e-tailers to audit their site’s content, taking into account text, images and videos when calculating whether they meet that ratio.
Woodhull Freedom Foundation COO Mandy Salley speculates that many retailers likely believe their content isn’t “explicit” enough to trigger AV requirements.
“Their websites might have pictures of products or models, but they are usually clothed,” Salley notes. “I think, by luck and because many legislators are very focused on porn, retailers probably haven’t seen a significant impact yet.”
Walters cautions that while a sexual wellness site with minimal explicit content might not trigger compliance issues, the line is rarely clear.
“Ultimately, the decision on offering AV services will depend on each operator’s willingness to accept risk,” Walters says. “Some of these definitions are intentionally vague and broad, giving claimants wide latitude to identify potential targets. Some AV laws don’t rely on specific percentages of adult content to determine applicability; instead, they use terms like ‘substantial’ or ‘significant.’ These definitions can make it difficult to determine the compliance expectations.”
Industry attorney and Free Speech Coalition (FSC) board chair Jeffrey Douglas sees the lack of clear definitions as deliberate.
“The most effective way to discourage behavior is often to refuse to specify what is considered lawful,” Douglas says. “In nearly all areas other than the regulation of sexual devices or activities, courts do not accept a law that doesn’t clearly inform the average person of what is legal and what is not.”
Under obscenity laws, Douglas notes, defendants tend to find out whether material is obscene only after a jury convicts them.
“For harmful material, there’s even less direction,” he laments. “That’s done on purpose because they want to discourage businesses from operating effectively in the marketplace, due to their underlying hostility toward sex.”
Douglas describes some potential pitfalls retail websites may encounter in this climate.
“Under many state statutes, if the product is anatomically correct — that is, if it looks like an erect human penis — that clearly falls under the definition of ‘harmful matter,’” he explains. “If it is just a missile-shaped but otherwise featureless dildo or vibrator, whether it is considered harmful matter depends on the description, because most state adult verification laws include written descriptions.”
FSC and its subdivision, the Sexual Wellness Professionals Association (SWPA), offer members referrals to attorneys experienced in age verification issues.
“The lawyer you consult will evaluate your risk and customize their advice based on all available information,” Douglas says.
Compliance Challenges and Options
Another tricky aspect of AV laws is that many require sites to hire external AV providers rather than create their own age verification process. Henning estimates that sites can expect to pay between $0.50 and $2 per verification, plus setup fees.
Those extra costs can mount up, notes Salley.
“Considering the huge traffic some of these websites get, it can become very costly very fast,” she says. “Also, some laws require age verification every 60 minutes, so it’s not enough to verify once and be done.”
In addition to the expense, outsourcing requires depending on a vendor to ensure compliance.
As Walters points out, the surge of state AV laws has led to a boom in AV service providers — some of whom seemingly appeared overnight.
“Their services depend on the provider’s understanding of legal obligations and the quality of their legal advice,” Walters says. “Some compliance methods offered by certain vendors are unlikely to satisfy the strict verification requirements of U.S. state laws. Since there is no federal AV law, states have created a patchwork of different verification options, data deletion and retention requirements, and other rules that can be difficult for any AV provider to understand and follow.”
Those data rules constitute a key part of compliance, since most AV laws require websites to delete a user’s information after verification. But that may not be entirely feasible, cautions Salley.
“The technology simply isn’t there yet,” she says. “I know technology can do some pretty amazing and innovative things, but right now, there isn’t any technology that can completely erase someone’s data — it still exists on a server somewhere. That’s a problem, to say the least. Most people in 2026 have experienced some form of hacking, such as having their credit card information stolen.”
While vendors can help streamline compliance, they do not let sites off the hook, Silverstein emphasizes.
“Companies still hold responsibility for ensuring the solution meets legal requirements, handles user data correctly and operates reliably,” he says. “Failures at the vendor level can still result in direct liability for the business.”
For that reason, Silverstein urges businesses to seek strong indemnification clauses, clear commitments on data handling and privacy, audit rights and performance guarantees when partnering with age verification providers.
In response to the concerns detailed above, FSC announced in March that it would grant members exclusive access to PrivateAV, which the organization describes as “a private, compliant and affordable age verification service that financially supports FSC’s advocacy work.”
PrivateAV provides two verification options: AI-based age estimation, and full document verification with biometric matching. To safeguard user privacy, no personal data is ever stored, logged or saved to disk. All inputs are immediately erased after verification, allowing site operators to prioritize user privacy.
FSC is offering PrivateAV as an additional membership benefit. Plans start at $30 per month for up to 1,000 verifications.
FSC Executive Director Alison Boden tells XBIZ, “We introduced PrivateAV to provide our members with an affordable, privacy-focused compliance option they can trust not to store or sell user data. We also believed it was crucial to offer a solution that doesn’t financially benefit the companies lobbying to implement even stricter age-verification laws.”
‘A new category of risk’
Another sector struggling to keep up with age verification laws and their implications: the insurance business.
According to Ashlin Hadden, founder and CEO of Essence Protection, traditional insurance policies were never designed to withstand the level of regulatory scrutiny AV brings — particularly for online-first pleasure-product companies.
“Most standard general liability policies and even many cyber policies either don’t cover age verification issues at all or quietly exclude them through broad regulatory, statutory or ‘knowing violation’ exclusions,” Hadden says. “The biggest gap is that these laws are creating a new category of risk that falls between privacy, consumer protection and product liability, but doesn’t fit neatly into any existing coverage.”
Claims about improper age verification, failure to restrict access, or alleged harm to minors can cause multiple exclusions at
once, leaving businesses unexpectedly uninsured.
“From a business point of view, age verification laws are forcing companies to make quick operational decisions in a very uncertain legal environment, and that’s exactly where insurance often falls short,” Hadden explains. “Many brands think that trying to comply gives them protection, but policies usually react based on how a claim is made, not on the intent behind it.”
As a result, Essence is advising clients to go beyond just compliance and assess how their verification processes, data management and platform integrations might be challenged.
“This includes reviewing vendor agreements, understanding how customer data is stored and verified, and ensuring that their risk-transfer strategies align with how regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys actually handle these cases,” says Hadden.
Ready for What’s Next
In today’s rapidly evolving landscape of laws and regulations governing adult content, it can be difficult to predict what new tactics inventive legislators or aggressive enforcement agencies might use next. So how can retailers and other sites in the adult space prepare for the future?
Silverstein’s advice: “Companies should create flexible systems, both legal and technical, that can adapt to evolving requirements across jurisdictions. This includes modular verification tools, ongoing legal monitoring and internal policies that can be quickly revised as laws change.”
Henning recommends that sex toy e-tailers subscribe to real-time tracking tools, perform documented quarterly site audits for legal defensibility. He also suggests analyzing revenue exposure, focusing on high-volume areas like Texas and Florida, and using IP geolocation to activate only the restrictions required in a given area.
“This shifts reactive firefighting into proactive adaptation,” Henning explains.
Other strategies for websites include routing traffic intelligently: light or no gate for low-risk regions or pure-product pages, and full verification where legally required, as well as regional site variants or SFW mirrors for high-enforcement markets.
On the insurance front, Hadden is developing coverage to protect her clients from lawsuits arising from AV.
“What we are developing with our carrier partners is more deliberate coverage that directly addresses these gray areas by reducing exclusions, clarifying defense coverage for regulatory actions and creating manuscript endorsements — custom-written amendments to an insurance policy — that specifically address age-verification-related allegations,” she explains.
Boden reaffirms FSC’s commitment to monitoring state, federal and international legislation, and sharing information members need so they aren’t caught off guard.
“On the federal side, we’re actively engaging with lawmakers, advocating for an approach that truly works instead of just copying the patchwork of state laws on a national level,” Boden says. “We’re also keeping members updated through guidance documents and communications as the landscape changes, and connecting them with legal experts who specialize in this area when they need personalized advice.”
FSC and its allies are proponents of device-level age verification, which ensures that age is confirmed once and shared with sites via an encrypted token that validates only what’s necessary: that the user is an adult.
“No identity documents or biometric scans on hundreds of websites are required,” Boden points out. “There are no data breaches exposing users’ browsing history. It eliminates the confusing patchwork of conflicting state laws for businesses to navigate. The technology is available; policymakers just need to catch up.”
For now, however, site-based AV laws have prompted platforms like Pornhub to go dark in many jurisdictions, while traffic has shifted to noncompliant sites, piracy has surged and VPN use has skyrocketed as users seek to avoid intrusive AV practices.
Boden says it’s obvious that the current approach to age verification is failing.
“None of this protects kids,” she states simply. “FSC is educating lawmakers about what’s really happening and why repeatedly collecting sensitive identity information from adults isn’t the solution. Judging by reactions to the spread of these laws, the breaking point may be near.
“The question is whether policymakers are willing to pursue solutions that truly work,” Boden says. “Or if they will keep passing laws that look good on paper but do nothing for children.”
Salley hopes that members of the adult retail community will reach out to their state and federal representatives and share how poorly conceived AV laws negatively affect legitimate businesses while failing to protect anyone effectively.
“People don’t necessarily want to be political or activists, but if policymakers aren’t hearing from the people affected, it’s really hard to oppose these things,” she says. “So we have to get loud.
