What is an “age gate”?

An age gate is one of the most prolific features of the modern internet. There’s a good bet that you came across a few age gates this past week — though in some cases the mechanics of what is happening is hidden under the hood.

An age gate is just that: a step, almost always at the beginning of your experience on an app, game or website, that is designed to “gate out” users under a certain age (usually 13). In some cases it isn’t actually designed to gate users out — but rather to assign users to an experience that is more appropriate for their age.

An example is when a user signs up for a game and indicates that they are under the age of 13, and the game disables chat features. Another is when a user signs up for a social media app, and they are prevented from setting up an account if they are under 13.

Of course, ‘13’ isn’t just a made-up age. It exists primarily because apps, games and websites, if they allow users under the age of 13, need to comply with prescriptive requirements in a US federal regulation titled the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (’COPPA’).

We won’t go into the history of COPPA here, nor the merits of using 13 as the yardstick for limiting certain personal information processing. In this article we will focus on how to build, configure, and maintain this age ‘gate’.

That’s because until recently, everything described above — enter your age, then get gated out if you are under 13 — has been a pretty simple thing for any software engineer to build and maintain. Today’s dynamic regulatory world, however, presents a near-insurmountable challenge for lawyers and software engineers.

‘I confirm I am over 13’

Many of us are familiar with the most basic form of an age gate: a pop-up that simply asks you to confirm that you are over 13. For a variety of reasons, including many explained below, this isn’t a great approach. In certain countries this can actually lead to regulatory risk, as we all know that it isn’t really going to keep younger children out. But it really has become a staple of the internet, so you’re probably familiar with this:

More often though, we see something like the examples below. In these cases, the restriction that a user must be at least 13 is configured behind the scenes, and the user will only discover that they aren’t old enough after they enter a date of birth or an age below 13:

What does the world look like today?

Let’s return then to the age of 13, which is the yardstick that millions of today’s age gates use.

Of all the states and countries around the world that define the age of digital consent in 2025, less than 30% use 13 as the relevant yardstick. In fact, the overall trend is that the age of digital consent is increasing, in many cases to 16 or 18.

Wait, what? How can that be? If more than 70% of the world actually uses an age that is much higher than 13, why are millions of age gates today still using 13?

Simply put: It’s complex and it’s changing rapidly.

Let’s say that you decide to adjust to the true age of digital consent in different countries (or even states), your legal team will need to run a global survey to collect all of these ages and conduct some analysis on whether you should follow strict legal rules, guidance or even inferred rules based on enforcement. They will likely create a large spreadsheet to capture all of this data. They’ll then hand this over to a team of software engineers who will hard code it into the first step of the user journey.

Here are a couple of maps that illustrate the complexity facing those lawyers and engineers.

Global Map: Age of Digital Consent (September 2025)

Global Map: Age of Adulthood/Majority (September 2025)

Solving for today’s world

Of course, you could take a risk-based approach, and tackle only a few countries. The reality however is that the law is moving so fast, and penalties and enforcement are getting so significant, that the “risk” of sticking to an age gate that is only programmed with the age of 13 — or just a few different ages for certain markets — is getting higher.

The cost of researching, building, and then maintaining this though is to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That isn’t practical for the vast majority of developers. Even for larger developers, the complexity is challenging and hugely time-consuming, stretching available resources.

At the end of the day, developers just want to focus on building their app, game or website — not spending most of their time figuring out how to define age.

Wouldn’t it be ideal if someone built a universal age gate to manage all this for everyone?

Key requirements

A universal age gate that is purpose-built for today’s world needs to have three key features:

• adjust to the age of a child and adult as those ages are defined by law in each country and state around the world (those maps above)

• segment users into appropriate categories, to avoid saving personal information

• stay up-to-date as the law changes

Ideal solution

Feature 1: Adjust to the age of a child and adult as those ages are defined by law in each country and state around the world

The vast majority of laws that impact access to online platforms include the concept of an “age of digital consent”. For COPPA this is 13, for GDPR this is 16 except where an individual EU member state chooses to derogate.

In certain cases this “age of digital consent” isn’t specifically set out in the law, but rather in guidance that is issued by a regulatory agency, as has historically been the case in Australia (where the Privacy Commissioner recommends using the age of 15 as the relevant yardstick).

We also need the age of adulthood (sometimes referred to as the “age of majority”) so that we can also set an upper band for age.

Fortunately, we have all of these ages documented in the Compliance Studio.

Feature 2: Segment users into appropriate categories, to avoid saving personal information

With the ages of digital consent and adulthood in one place, we can now create a framework to assign each user to an age category.

Feature 3: Stay up-to-date as the law changes

The law doesn’t stand still. In fact, in 2024 alone we saw 33 states or countries either introduce or amend the age of digital consent. This means that we can’t just take all of the above age categories, save them onto a spreadsheet and include them in the code of an app, game or platform.

We need something that is dynamic and purpose-built to stay up-to-date.

Fortunately, we built this as part of our Compliance Development Kit (CDK), so we can leverage a monthly API update to ensure that our categories can stay current and accurate.

Introducing AgeKit

It shouldn’t require an army of lawyers and engineers to make sure your age gate is suitable for today’s globally dynamic world. It should just work.

That’s why we created AgeKit.

• AgeKit is a simple lightweight API, that tells your app, game, website or platform whether a user is a Digital Minor, Digital Youth or Digital Adult, for anyone, anywhere in the world.

• AgeKit is powered with the age data from the Regulatory Hub in our Compliance Studio, and it gets an update every month.

• AgeKit is built to handle billions of calls, making it infinitely scalable for any app, game, website or platform.

You can check it out on our Swagger.

Wait List

Visit agekit.io to learn more and join the waitlist.