Youth safety

What it is

Youth safety refers to the rules and mechanisms designed to protect children and teenagers online, spanning content moderation, default privacy settings, age assurance and advertising limits. It sits across regulation such as the UK Online Safety Act and the ICO Children's Code, US laws such as COPPA, and platform policies set by search engines, social networks and AI providers. In AI search, it also covers how assistants respond to minors and which topics they refuse, soften or redirect.

Why it matters

Youth safety determines whether your content is eligible for discovery at all on surfaces that serve younger users, and whether ads can be targeted or personalised. Getting it wrong risks regulatory action, platform demotion or outright removal, while brands seen as careless with minors face reputational damage that outlasts any ranking loss. For AI assistants, safety classifiers may suppress a brand or category entirely in conversations judged to involve a minor, even when the underlying content is lawful.

How it works

Practitioners map which parts of a site or product are likely to attract under-18s, apply age assurance where duties require it, and set stricter defaults for accounts that may belong to minors. They tag or gate age-restricted content so crawlers and classifiers can recognise it, exclude minors from behavioural ad targeting, and document risk assessments and moderation processes. Many teams run periodic reviews with legal and trust and safety colleagues, and test how assistants describe their category in teen-mode or youth-focused contexts.

When it applies

Youth safety applies whenever a service is likely to be accessed by under-18s, not only when it is aimed at them, and whenever content touches age-restricted categories such as alcohol, gambling, cosmetic procedures, weight loss or adult material. It also applies at product launch, when entering new markets with different child protection laws, and when adding AI chat or user-generated features.

Examples

• A gambling operator blocks its promotional pages from appearing in assistant answers and search results shown to signed-in users flagged as under 18, and applies age verification before any account creation.
• An AI chat assistant used by a retailer routes questions about diet supplements from suspected teen users to general healthy eating guidance and a prompt to speak to a parent or GP, rather than recommending products.
• An ed-tech platform completes a children's risk assessment, turns off profiling by default for school accounts and publishes a child-friendly privacy summary alongside its standard policy.

How it is measured

• Share of youth-facing or age-restricted pages correctly labelled and gated in a quarterly content audit
• Age assurance completion and pass rates on restricted journeys, plus drop-off caused by the check
• Volume and resolution time of youth safety reports, escalations or regulator and platform notices
• Coverage of minor exclusions in ad campaigns, measured as the proportion of active campaigns with correct age targeting and personalisation settings
• Refusal or redirect rate in assistant responses about your category when the session is treated as a minor