Pornhub’s 13-State Story Is Outdated: 27 States Have Passed Age Checks
The 13-state framing no longer describes Pornhub’s dispute with U.S. lawmakers. The Free Speech Coalition’s July 2026 FAQ says 27 states have passed age-verification requirements aimed at adult websites, with substantial differences in coverage, verification methods and enforcement.
The legal foundation also changed after the original wave of state withdrawals. In a 6–3 decision issued June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld Texas’s requirement, concluding that states may demand proof of age before adults access online material deemed sexually explicit and harmful to minors.
This is not a government order banning Pornhub by name
Calling the situation a Pornhub ban compresses two separate actions into one. State laws generally impose age-verification duties on a category of covered websites; Pornhub and its parent company, Aylo, then decide whether to introduce an approved verification process, challenge the requirement or stop serving visitors whose location falls within that jurisdiction.
That distinction matters because a statute taking effect does not necessarily make every adult website disappear. A compliant operator may remain available behind an age check, while another may withdraw completely. Enforcement can also differ among states, so the number of enacted laws, the number currently enforceable and the number of states where a particular Aylo service is unavailable should not be treated as interchangeable totals.
Geolocation adds another limitation. A refusal screen ordinarily reflects the location inferred from a visitor’s internet connection, not a nationwide removal of the website or its content. The result experienced by a resident is still a loss of ordinary access, but the immediate blocking decision belongs to the platform rather than to an internet service provider executing a state blacklist.
Where adult-site age checks are in effect
The industry tracker’s current list covers Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
These laws are not copies with perfectly matching thresholds. Most target commercial services when roughly one-third of their material meets a state definition of content harmful to minors, but Kansas uses a 25% webpage threshold. Ohio, South Dakota and Wyoming do not use the common minimum-content formula. Some statutes apply only to commercial entities, while others cast a wider net.
Verification options likewise vary. They can include government-issued identification, a mobile driver’s licence, transactional records or checks against commercial databases. Florida requires at least one anonymous option, while other jurisdictions specify different combinations or permit a broadly defined commercially reasonable method.
Consequences also differ. Depending on the state, an operator can face attorney-general enforcement, civil penalties, private claims or injunctive relief. That fragmented structure helps explain why a platform may choose a uniform withdrawal for one state instead of developing a separate flow around every statute’s definitions, technical methods and liability provisions.
The Supreme Court narrowed the central constitutional challenge
The Texas case did not declare every possible age-verification system constitutional. It addressed Texas H.B. 1181, which requires covered services to use reasonable methods to establish that a visitor is at least 18 and allows verification through government identification or transactional data.
The majority applied intermediate scrutiny rather than the more demanding strict-scrutiny standard requested by the challengers. It reasoned that the requirement advances the state’s interest in preventing minors from accessing sexually explicit material and only incidentally burdens adults who must prove their age.
The ruling nevertheless altered the strategic landscape for adult platforms and creators. A broad facial challenge to the Texas model failed at the country’s highest court, giving other states a stronger precedent when defending materially similar laws. Disputes can continue over a particular statute’s scope, implementation, privacy protections or enforcement, but the argument that online age verification is inherently beyond state authority no longer matches the governing Texas precedent.
Why creators and smaller platforms are also exposed
The laws are commonly discussed through Pornhub because its withdrawals are highly visible, but their text can reach much further. Depending on the statute, a covered party may include the company operating a platform and potentially a creator or publisher whose material is viewed inside the regulating state.
For independent adult creators, the practical issue is therefore not limited to whether Pornhub loads. A business must determine where its audience is located, whether its content crosses the relevant state threshold, which verification methods are accepted and who carries responsibility if a minor obtains access. Platforms can centralize that compliance work; a small subscription service may have fewer technical and legal resources.
This creates a distribution consequence for the creator economy. When a major platform exits a jurisdiction, creators can lose lawful adult viewers there even though the state has not prohibited adults from seeing their work. Moving distribution to another service does not automatically eliminate the obligation, because the same state rule may apply to the replacement platform.
Pornhub is now lobbying for a different verification layer
The company has moved beyond displaying withdrawal messages. In August 2026, Axios reported on Pornhub’s repeal campaign, saying the platform had contacted more than 300 lawmakers, governors and attorneys general across nearly 30 states and was advocating device-level age controls involving companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.
That proposal shifts the point of verification rather than abandoning age restrictions. Pornhub’s position is that a device-based signal would avoid making individual adult websites collect or arrange repeated checks and would be harder to evade through a simple change in apparent location. States and their enforcement officials have not broadly adopted that alternative, and Iowa officials publicly defended site-level verification.
The current story is therefore larger than a tally of places where one website shows a refusal notice. It is a contest over who should verify age, what information an adult must provide, which businesses bear the cost and liability, and whether state-by-state rules can operate consistently across a borderless publishing market. The old 13-state figure survives as historical context, not as a reliable description of the present legal landscape.
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