Transcript
Australia’s New Online Safety Rules: What the Under-16 Ban and Search Age Checks Mean for Marketers
After a short escape to Penang in Malaysia it’s jarring to come home to a very different kind of “surprise”: Australia is about to fundamentally change how people access the internet.
From December 10, 2025, a suite of Online Safety measures will roll out that go far beyond “protecting kids on social media.” They will reshape how Australians log into platforms, how search engines work, and how businesses reach and measure their audiences.
This article unpacks those changes, shows how AI was used to research and explain them, and explores what they mean for e-commerce, SEO and digital marketing.
The New Online Safety Landscape in Australia
At the centre of all this is the Online Safety Act and its amendments, plus new industry codes being enforced by the eSafety Commissioner.
There are two big pillars marketers need to understand:
- Under-16 social media ban
From 10 December 2025, major platforms designated as “age-restricted social media” (including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch and others) must take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from having accounts, or risk civil penalties of up to AUD $49.5 million per breach. - Search engine age-assurance codes
From 27 December 2025, search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing will have to use age-assurance technology for logged-in users, again under the threat of fines approaching $50 million per breach.
Taken together, these rules are effectively building a new digital border around the Australian internet—starting with kids and logged-in search, but highly likely to spread to other parts of the web.
The Core Paradox: To Protect Kids, Everyone Gets Checked
The logic behind the law produces a powerful paradox:
- Lawmakers want to be sure a 15-year-old cannot get onto a platform.
- You can’t achieve that by simply asking someone their age.
- The only way to be confident a minor isn’t sneaking through is to verify the age of everyone, including adults.
In practice, that pushes the system towards age-checking the entire population.
That leads to a two-tier internet:
- The verified web
Adults who have proven their age (via ID, facial estimation, digital ID, etc.) get the “full” version of platforms and search results. - The default web
Anyone else—anonymous users, logged-out users, Incognito users, VPN users whose identity can’t be clearly seen—gets a filtered, child-mode version of the internet by default. Explicit or “high impact” content is blurred, downgraded or removed, with SafeSearch-style filters maxed out.
The crucial shift is this:
Default identity: from “anonymous user” to “presumed minor” until you prove otherwise.
The only way back to an unfiltered experience is to log in and verify yourself, which undermines the entire premise of private browsing.
What Happens to Incognito Mode and SEO Checking?
For marketers and SEOs, this hits a very familiar workflow.
Right now, Incognito or private browsing is used to:
- De-personalise Google results
- Check SERPs without account-level history
- See what searchers in other locations might see (often combined with a VPN)
Under the new regime, that neutral Incognito experience is effectively rebranded as child-safe mode:
- Strict filters by default
- Certain result types blurred or removed
- Logged-out behaviour treated as if the user could be a child
If you want to see “normal” results, you’ll increasingly need to:
- Be logged into a verified account, and
- Prove your age in some way (ID, facial scan, digital ID, card checks, or some other age-assurance signal).
That introduces several headaches:
- SEO testing becomes less reliable if your unlogged tests are throttled to a “kid-safe” version of search.
- VPN-based checking may get blocked or heavily constrained if platforms can’t confidently determine who’s behind the connection.
- Ad verification—for example, checking age-restricted ads or creatives—is harder when private modes no longer show the same outputs your adult audience sees.
Economic Friction: The Hidden Cost for E-commerce
Beyond privacy and free-speech debates, there’s a cold, commercial concept at play: economic friction.
Every extra step—ID upload, selfie, form, or re-login—is another point where users can drop out of a journey:
- Sign-ups to social platforms
- Logins to ad-driven communities
- Conversions on age-gated funnels (e.g. certain health products, alcohol, gambling, adult-adjacent content)
Global evidence suggests the impact can be brutal. When Louisiana in the US rolled out strict ID checks for adult sites, Pornhub reported an 80% drop in traffic from that state.
If Australian platforms and advertisers are forced to add similar checks:
- Four out of five prospects may simply bounce rather than hand over ID.
- Corporate VPN traffic might be throttled if the system can’t see verified individuals behind it.
- Small businesses heavily reliant on social media could watch their reachable audiences shrink virtually overnight.
For e-commerce brands, this isn’t theoretical. It’s about:
- Fewer eyes on organic posts
- Reduced remarketing pools
- More abandoned journeys at the point of friction
- Lower reach for paid campaigns aimed at age-restricted audiences
Is This a Trojan Horse for a National Digital ID?
One of the more provocative readings of these changes is that they function as a Trojan horse for a national digital ID ecosystem.
The rough sequence looks like this:
- Mandate age checks everywhere (social media, search, and more to come).
- Let users struggle with fragmented, high-friction solutions (e.g. uploading a passport scan to Facebook or verifying through third-party services they don’t trust).
- Then present a single, convenient government-backed digital ID as the one-click way to breeze through all those gates.
Over time, logging in with a government-linked ID just to:
- Scroll a feed
- Watch a video
- Run a search
…starts to feel normal.
The trade-off? A web where anonymity is increasingly rare, where the same credentials follow people across services, and where online life is tightly bound to a state-verified identity.
How AI Was Used to Analyse and Explain All This
Interestingly, the entire explainer around these laws was produced using a multi-step AI workflow that any marketer or educator could copy:
- Deep research with Gemini
- One report focused on friction and personal sovereignty—how age checks change user freedom and add drag to everyday online life.
- A second report looked at SEO implications—especially for marketers using Google Incognito and VPNs to check results in other locations.
- Structuring the story in Notebook LM
Both reports were loaded into Notebook LM (a Google tool designed for research and study). From there, the system was prompted to generate a scripted explainer video, complete with slide-like structure and narrative flow. - Fixing the voice in ElevenLabs
Notebook LM currently narrates in an American accent. To localise the content, the script was:- Transcribed from the Notebook LM output
- Fed into ElevenLabs, using a previously cloned Australian voice
- Exported as high-quality audio and stitched back over the Notebook LM video visuals
This pipeline shows how AI can help:
- Digest complex legislation quickly
- Produce structured, educational content
- Localise voice and style so it resonates with an Australian audience
For agencies and in-house teams, it’s a repeatable pattern for turning dense policy changes into client-friendly explainers, training materials, or public-facing content.
What Marketers and Business Owners Should Do Now
With deadlines locked in and tech giants already preparing for enforcement, this is no longer a hypothetical future.
Here are practical next steps:
- Map where age verification could hit your funnels
- Do you rely heavily on social for discovery or community?
- Do any offers sit near “adult” categories (health, finance, gaming, etc.) that could be inadvertently swept into stricter checks?
- Plan for lost reach and rising friction
- Model conversion drops if 20–80% of users abandon journeys at ID prompts.
- Consider diversifying channels (email, SEO content, owned communities) that are less exposed to platform-level bans.
- Re-think SEO and ad verification workflows
- Assume Incognito and VPN-based checking may no longer show the same experience your adult audience sees.
- Build processes that use a mix of logged-in, verified test accounts and third-party tracking tools.
- Stay informed and involved
- Follow updates from the eSafety Commissioner and reputable tech outlets.
- Read independent analysis from digital rights groups and industry associations.
- Talk to your federal member
Perhaps most importantly, engage with the democratic side of this shift. If you’re concerned about the balance between child safety, business viability and adult privacy, contact your local federal MP—by phone, email or in person—and ask how they’re weighing those trade-offs.
The Big Question: What Price Are We Willing to Pay?
The stated goal of these laws is clear: make the internet safer for children.
But to get there, Australia appears to be building an infrastructure where:
- Anonymity is heavily eroded
- Age checks and identity proofs become routine
- Everyday digital activity is increasingly tied to government-recognised credentials
For e-commerce brands and digital marketers, the challenge now is to:
- Protect revenue from rising friction
- Adapt measurement and SEO practices to a filtered web
- Participate in the policy conversation before the new system quietly becomes “just how the internet works”
If you work in marketing, e-commerce or SEO, now is the time to:
- Share this analysis with your team
- Audit your funnels
- And yes, pick up the phone or send an email to your local federal member.
Australia’s internet is being rewritten. The question is not just whether it will be safer for kids—but what it will cost everyone else. If you have any questions or comments about these new rules, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at jim@stewartmedia.biz.
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