Age Assurance Explained: Verification, Estimation, Segmentation, and Gating
The digital landscape is undergoing fundamental transformation as governments worldwide confront the urgent need to protect children from harmful online content and interactions.
Regulatory frameworks are evolving at unprecedented speed, with emerging legislation mandating comprehensive safety protocols that position Age Assurance as a fundamental compliance requirement.
From the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act to Australia’s social media ban for under-16s and and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling at the end of June 2025 to uphold a Texas law requiring age verification for adult content, the message is clear: the era of simple “click here if you’re over 18” checkboxes is coming to an end.
Organizations around the world must now balance child protection with user privacy and constitutional rights while navigating this complex regulatory landscape. As these regulations multiply and evolve, so does the confusion around key terminology.
Understanding Key Age Assurance-Related Terminology
What exactly is the difference between Age Assurance and Age Verification? Where does Age Estimation factor into regulatory compliance? At what point should organizations integrate Age Segmentation and Age Gating into their broader safety and compliance framework?
These distinctions matter more than ever. As regulators increasingly reject self-declaration methods and demand “highly effective” age assurance measures, understanding the nuances between these approaches becomes critical for compliance, user experience, and business strategy.
With non-compliance potentially resulting in fines reaching tens of millions of dollars and complete market exclusion, the stakes have reached unprecedented levels. Implementing Age Assurance correctly has become essential for sustaining viable business operations in an increasingly regulated digital environment.
In this post, we’ll explain the five key concepts that every organization needs to understand in today’s regulatory environment: Age Assurance, Age Estimation, Age Verification, Age Segmentation, and Age Gating.
1. Age Assurance
Definition:
Age Assurance is the umbrella term encompassing all methods and technologies used to determine, verify, or estimate a user’s age for regulatory compliance, safety, and business purposes. Age Estimation, Age Verification, Age Segmentation, and Age Gating are components of Age Assurance.
Key Characteristics:
- Combines multiple methods (estimation, verification, segmentation, gating) based on risk assessment and regulatory requirements.
- Adapts verification rigor to match the sensitivity of content or services being accessed.
- Ensures compliance with applicable laws like COPPA, the UK Online Safety Act, or the EU Digital Services Act.
- Provides organizations with flexible, scalable solutions to meet diverse age-related compliance requirements while balancing user experience, privacy, and regulatory obligations.
2. Age Estimation
Definition:
Age Estimation refers to techniques used to infer a user’s age, such as analyzing facial features from a selfie or estimating age from behavioral or account-based signals like email. Among these, face-based age estimation stands out as the most accurate and secure method, offering high precision without requiring sensitive personal data.
Key Traits:
- Non-intrusive: Requires only passive data collection, such as a selfie.
- Privacy-focused: Can be designed to protect user privacy by not collecting or storing personally identifiable information.
- Cost-effective: Usually ****more cost-effective than more advanced age verification methods.
3. Age Verification
Definition:
Age Verification confirms a user’s age using trusted data or documents to ensure compliance with regulations or eligibility for age-restricted services.
Methods Include:
- Document Verification: Extracting date of birth from government-issued ID.
- Database Verification: Cross-referencing name, DOB, and address against authoritative databases.
Now that we’ve covered Age Verification and Age Estimation, it’s important to understand how these methods are applied in practice. Platforms don’t just use Age Assurance to block access; they also use it to tailor user experiences based on age. This brings us to two key use cases:
4. Age Gating
Definition:
Age Gating refers to the process of restricting access to digital content, services, or products based on the user’s age, following Age Estimation or Age Verification.
Use Cases:
- Streaming or gaming content
- Online purchase of regulated products (alcohol, crypto, etc.)
- Financial services with age-specific KYC rules
5. Age Segmentation
Definition:
Age Segmentation is implemented after Age Estimation or Age Verification has been carried out. It involves categorizing users into different age brackets (e.g., under 13, 13–17, 18+) to tailor user journeys, marketing, and compliance workflows.
Purpose:
- Personalization: e.g., adjust UI or offers based on age group.
- Compliance: both COPPA and GDPR-K require platforms to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting or processing personal data for users under certain age thresholds (e.g., under 13 under COPPA, under 16 under GDPR-K in some jurisdictions)
Effective Age Assurance with Incode
0 Friction, Full Compliance, Privacy designed
Incode’s Age Assurance solution helps platforms stay compliant while protecting user privacy and keeping friction low. Using a privacy-first waterfall approach, it starts with the least intrusive check and steps up only when needed. These are the three optimized ways in which Incode verifies a user’s age:
- Facial age estimation Uses in-house built AI models to estimate age based on a facial image, without requiring an ID.
- Document Age verification Extracts and validates the date of birth from an identity document while verifying the document’s authenticity; later, the user’s selfie is compared against the ID picture to ensure ownership of the document.
- DOB data verification Verifies date of birth data provided by the user against authoritative sources or client-owned data
Automated Waterfall Flow
The system automatically begins with the least invasive method and escalates only when required, ensuring compliance without sacrificing conversion.
- Automatically escalates to stronger checks only when needed
- Built-in compliance logic adjusts by country, industry, and platform
- One unified SDK powers the full flow with zero user interruption
- Completes a full verification in seconds, even with step-ups
- Approach recommended by regulators as best practice in age assurance
Why Partner With Incode For Effective Age Assurance
- Fully compliant with global age assurance regulations around the world, including the UK’s Online Safety Act.
- Reduces user churn caused by the friction introduced by these regulations.
- Follows a privacy-first by design approach, with live data redaction and automatic data deletion.
- Achieves lowest error rates, no demographic bias, and 99.9% true positive accuracy.
- Powered by proprietary technology, built to scale and adapt fast across platforms, regions, and use cases.
- Stops identity fraud before it starts with multi-frame liveness checks, spoof detection, and deepfake detection.
Recognized by Industry Leaders
- Market-leading performance in NIST Age Estimation testing
- Named a Leader in age verification and age estimation by Liminal
- Named a Leading Vendor in Liminal’s Link™ Index Report for KYC
- Named most visionary leader in the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification
- PAS 1296 certified for global performance and compliance
- 1st certified Passive Liveness solution under ISO 30107-3
Trusted By Users
Incode was recently awarded 12 new G2 badges, including a Leader badge in Age Verification, in the G2 Summer 2025 Reports. G2 is one of the world’s most trusted software review platforms, and helps buyers find the right solutions for their needs.
Incode was among the 4% of software and services featured on G2 to receive at least one Leader badge in G2’s Spring 2025 Reports. In total, Incode received three Leader badges.
*Learn more about Incode’s Age Assurance solutions.*