U.S OnlyFans Usage Plummets 28.5% in Q1 2026 as Americans Turn On for AI Porn

For four years, OnlyFans in the United States has only gone one way: up. More subscribers. More creators. More spend. 2025 was the peak — $2.63 billion in US fan spend, 1.29 million American creators sharing $1.68 billion in earnings, and a creator economy big enough to quietly contribute $338 million in federal and state taxes.

Q1 2026 may have just broken the streak — and hard.

OnlyGuider’s latest cross-dataset analysis shows that in the first three months of 2026, US OnlyFans search demand collapsed by 28.5% year-on-year. Every single US state went down. Every single one. Some states — Tennessee, North Dakota, Kentucky, Alabama — fell by more than 40%. In cities like Memphis, Virginia Beach and Nashville, the Q1 drop was over 45%.

But critically, Onlyguider reveals that over the trailing 12 months, US searches for AI porn rose 76% year-on-year — and +1,376% over the past three years.

The two trends are moving in opposite directions, at high speed, in the same places at the same time. And unlike previous “is porn changing?” headlines — this time the numbers come with a dollar sign attached. If Q1 2026 holds for the rest of the year, the US OnlyFans market shrinks from $2.63B to $1.88B — a $750 million difference. Creator revenue drops from $1.68B to $1.21B — a $481 million difference. The IRS and state treasuries lose around $97 million in creator tax contribution.

This is not the end of OnlyFans. Not by any stretch. It’s still one of the biggest consumer platforms on the internet and a $2B+ economy even on the base case. But is it the beginning of the end? That’s the question Q1 2026 just put on the table.

TL;DR — The Q1 2026 Picture

• US OnlyFans search demand Q1 2026: −28.5% YoY
• States down on OnlyFans in Q1 2026: 50 out of 50
• Cities with a double-digit OnlyFans drop: All 164 in our panel
• US AI porn search demand: +76% trailing-12-month YoY (and +1,376% over 3 years)
• Cities where AI porn searches grew AND OnlyFans fell: 140 of 164 (85.4%)
• Correlation between OF decline and AI rise across cities: Statistically significant (Pearson r = −0.42, p < 0.001)
• Worldwide sense-check (Google Ads data): OnlyFans searches −23.9% Q1 2026 YoY globally — the US decline is not isolated
• Potential 2026 US OnlyFans spend (if Q1 trend holds): $1.88B — a $750M difference vs 2025
• Potential 2026 creator revenue difference: −$481M
• Potential creator tax contribution difference: −$97M
• US moms earning on OnlyFans in 2025: 115,893 — of whom ~37,897 rely on OnlyFans as sole household income

What Just Happened

From January to March 2026, OnlyGuider tracked search demand for OnlyFans across every US state and the 164 largest US cities. The results were, frankly, not subtle.

Every single state was down. The best-performing state in Q1 2026 was New Hampshire — and it was still down 7.7% year-on-year. The worst-performing state, Tennessee, was down 50.6%. The national average came in at −28.5%.

This does not happen. Not in a platform that spent four years climbing. Not across 100% of a country simultaneously. Not in a quarter.

At the city level the story was even sharper. Every single major US city we track (population 250,000+) was down on OnlyFans in Q1 2026. In the top decliners alone — Memphis, Virginia Beach, Nashville — Q1 drops exceeded 45%. Seven major cities dropped by more than 40%. The places we’d expect to lead — Atlanta, Miami, Las Vegas, Orlando — were among the biggest casualties.

Top 10 States — Biggest Q1 2026 OnlyFans decline

Top 10 Cities — Biggest Q1 2026 OnlyFans decline

Major US cities, population 250,000+

And then we looked at what else changed.

AI Porn Just Had the Quarter of Its Life

While OnlyFans was falling in every US state, AI porn was rising in every US state — and doing so at a pace that, for anyone not paying close attention, probably came as a surprise.

US searches for “AI porn” rose 76% year-on-year over the trailing 12 months. That sounds like a big number. In context, it’s even bigger — because AI porn search demand has now grown +1,376% over the past three years, with no quarter of meaningful decline since early 2022. This is a linear-looking growth curve based on OnlyGuider’s analysis of quarterly US AI porn search demand from Q1 2022 through Q1 2026 — four straight years with no meaningful reversal.

Some states saw triple-digit increases:

Top 10 States — Biggest Q1 2026 AI porn increase

In major cities, the picture got wild. Newark and Buffalo both posted AI porn search increases of +400% or more year-on-year, and Milwaukee, Tulsa and Nashville all more than tripled. Dozens of major US cities (population 250,000+) doubled their AI porn search volume in twelve months.

Top 10 Cities — Biggest Q1 2026 AI porn increase

Major US cities, population 250,000+

And the cities where AI porn search is now most intense on a per-capita basis — regardless of growth rate — read like a map of America’s modern urban economy:

Top 10 Cities — Highest AI porn intensity (searches per 10,000 residents, Q1 2026)

Major US cities, population 250,000+

Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Miami, St. Louis, Dallas — these aren’t fringe places. These are major metros, and a meaningful share of their residents are now searching Google for AI porn every quarter.

The Left-Right Combo: These Two Things Are Happening in the Same Places

Here’s where the story gets genuinely interesting — and here’s where we stop calling it a coincidence.

In 140 out of 164 of the largest US cities (85.4%), OnlyFans search went down in Q1 2026 while AI porn search went up. In all 50 states, the same pattern held.

When we ran a formal statistical test — Pearson correlation on the per-capita change in each metric — we got a result of r = −0.42, p < 0.001 across 164 cities. In plain English: the cities where OnlyFans fell hardest were, with high statistical confidence, also the cities where AI porn rose fastest. When we excluded the 25 states with age-verification laws on the books (which could have been a confounding factor), the relationship still held: r = −0.28, p = 0.015 across the remaining 76 cities.

We want to be careful here. Correlation is not causation. We are not saying every lost OnlyFans subscriber became an AI porn user. What we are saying is that the two trends are moving in opposite directions, at the same time, in the same places, across the entire United States — and the data says that is not random.

A word on age-verification laws: 25 US states now have age-verification laws in force, and Pornhub is blocked in 23 of them. OnlyFans is not blocked anywhere. The platform already collects government-issued ID during creator onboarding, which makes it structurally compliant with Louisiana Act 440, Texas HB 1181, Florida HB 3 and similar statutes. We tested whether AI porn growth was higher in AV states than non-AV states. It wasn’t — the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.39). This is not a story about porn laws. It’s a story about technology substitution playing out nationwide.

This Isn’t Just Happening in America

OnlyGuider’s Wrapped 2025 report, published November 2025 and anchored to Fenix International Ltd’s filed accounts, documented OnlyFans’ continued global revenue growth through 2025 — from $6.6 billion in 2024 to $7.2 billion in 2025, a 9% increase. In that report, the US was characterised as a “mature giant” — stable, high-volume, modest growth. That was the picture as of end-of-year 2025.

Q1 2026 is the first quarter in which the search-demand side of that story appears to have turned. We pulled Google Ads search-volume data for the term “onlyfans” worldwide for Q1 2026 and compared it to Q1 2025:

Revenue in 2025 was up — that much is anchored to Fenix’s filings. But search demand is what drives next year’s revenue, and the Q1 2026 worldwide signal shows the same directional break we’re seeing at the US level. The US decline we’ve documented is not isolated to one country.

This is the distinction that matters: 2025 was a growth year on revenue. Q1 2026 is the first quarter where the demand side broke. Whether that’s a single-quarter correction or the start of a genuine turn is what the rest of 2026 will tell us. But it is no longer a purely American story.

What This Means in Dollars — US OnlyFans Spend in 2026

Here is the straightforward part. If US OnlyFans search demand in Q1 2026 is down 28.5%, that’s fan engagement pulling back. Fan engagement is what drives spend. So if that Q1 trend holds for the full year, US OnlyFans spend follows the same curve.

Applied to OnlyGuider’s 2025 baseline of $2.63 billion, three scenarios bracket the outcome:

Under the base case, that’s $750 million of US consumer spend that was going into the adult creator economy in 2025 — and is now, on current trends, going somewhere else.

At state level the dollar difference is obviously biggest in the biggest markets:

Top 10 States — Potential 2026 OnlyFans Spend Difference

See Top 10 States table above — California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois alone account for roughly $283M of the potential 2026 spend difference.

But the pain is everywhere. Every state in our full state appendix below is on track for a 2026 spend decline if current trends continue.

What This Means for US Creators — The 28.5% Pay Cut Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s the point that deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Creator revenue on OnlyFans follows fan spend. So when fan spend in a state drops 28.5%, creator revenue in that state drops 28.5% too. The math is almost one-to-one.

OnlyGuider’s 2026 U.S. OnlyFans Creator Census established that in 2025:

• 1,297,804 Americans earned money on OnlyFans
• They earned a combined $1,687,145,576 — an average of $1,300 per creator, per year
• This headline average is dragged down by a long tail of dormant accounts — active, committed creators earn substantially more

Under the Q1 2026 base case:

For a creator who earned $50,000 on OnlyFans in 2025, the base-case trajectory points to roughly $35,750 in 2026. For one who earned $20,000, it’s $14,300. Those are not abstract numbers. Those are rent payments, car payments and childcare bills.

The states where the creator-income hit lands hardest are not necessarily the states with the biggest OF markets — they’re the states that combine a large creator base with a steep Q1 2026 decline:

Top 10 States — Potential 2026 Creator Revenue Difference

Florida creators are looking at a $53 million revenue difference. California creators: $52 million. Texas: $47 million. Georgia: $31 million. This is income leaving the pockets of hundreds of thousands of Americans in a single year if Q1 2026 trends hold.

What This Means for US Moms

The most exposed group inside the creator economy is the one we mapped in our MILFdex 2026 report — 115,893 US mothers who earned money on OnlyFans in 2025, generating $150.6 million in creator revenue.

In OnlyGuider’s March 2026 survey of 500 MILF creators:

• 32.7% — roughly 37,897 moms — said OnlyFans is their sole source of income
• 36.8% — roughly 42,648 moms — use it as a side hustle on top of another job
• 12.8% — roughly 14,834 moms — also receive government assistance (SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, housing support)

Apply the base-case 28.5% decline to the MILF segment:

For the ~37,897 mothers who depend on OnlyFans as their sole source of income, that represents roughly $14 million evaporating from US household budgets on current trends — money that was covering groceries, rent, childcare, car payments. The ~14,834 who combine OF earnings with state assistance get pushed further into benefit dependence, in exactly the states where OF income is falling fastest.

Politicians, economists and think tanks have been worrying loudly for two years about what AI means for white-collar work. Q1 2026 is the first hard data set we’ve seen showing what it might also mean for the hundreds of thousands of American women — many of them mothers — who quietly built a real household income on top of a creator platform.

So — Is This the Beginning of the End for OnlyFans?

OnlyFans isn’t going anywhere (yet). It’s one of the largest consumer destinations on the internet, a $2-billion-plus US economy even on our base case, a platform with a creator base of 1.3 million Americans and a fan base in the tens of millions. One quarter of bad data — even a very bad quarter — doesn’t end something this big overnight.

But the question we can’t yet answer is whether Q1 2026 is a reset or a turning point. One quarter is a single data point. Two quarters tell you a trend. Four quarters tell you a year.

What the data does say, without ambiguity, is this:

1. Every US state fell on OnlyFans at the same time
2. Every US state rose on AI porn at the same time
3. The two are statistically correlated in the same places
4. The worldwide Q1 2026 signal moved in the same direction as the US — the decline is not isolated
5. There is no current evidence in any dataset we track of the AI porn growth curve slowing

On current trends, the financial impact in 2026 alone runs to $750 million in US fan spend and $481 million in US creator earnings.

Whether OnlyFans stabilises, rebounds, or continues down from here is a question only the next three quarters of data can answer. OnlyGuider will publish Q2, Q3 and Q4 2026 updates as the picture develops. For now, we think this is the most important shift we’ve seen in the adult creator economy in the four years we’ve been tracking it — and quite possibly a shift the wider economy should be paying attention to, because if AI is quietly pulling $481 million out of the pockets of 1.3 million American creators in a single year, it is probably doing something similar, somewhere else, that we haven’t measured yet.

Appendix A — All 50 US States + DC, Full Q1 2026 Data

Appendix B — All 164 US Cities in OnlyGuider’s City Panel, Full Q1 2026 Data

Methodology

Data sources

• OnlyGuider Q1 2026 OnlyFans search volume analysis conducted April 2026.
• OnlyGuider AI Porn US search volume analysis conducted April 2026 (state, city per-capita, city by quarter pop 250k+)
• OnlyGuider U.S. OnlyFans Spending by State & City 2025
• OnlyGuider The 2026 U.S. OnlyFans Creator Census
• OnlyGuider MILFdex 2026

Year-on-year metric
Q1 2025 vs Q1 2026 percentage change in OnlyGuider’s search-volume panel.

Scenario modelling for 2026
Each state’s actual Q1 2026 YoY% applied to that state’s 2025 spend baseline (from the U.S. OnlyFans Spending by State & City 2025 report), then summed nationally. Optimistic and pessimistic scenarios stress-test ±11–12 percentage points either side of the base-case scenario. These scenarios describe potential 2026 outcomes if the Q1 2026 trend continues — they are not OnlyGuider forecasts.

Creator revenue
Taken directly from the 2026 U.S. OnlyFans Creator Census methodology: state-level creator counts × $1,300 average annual earnings per creator. Potential 2026 creator revenue in each state is the 2025 baseline multiplied by that state’s actual Q1 2026 YoY change in OnlyFans search demand — a scenario describing what 2026 would look like if the Q1 trend held for the full year.

Tax contribution
Modelled using the Creator Census tax framework: blended 18% effective federal rate (8% income + 10% self-employment), plus each state’s applicable personal income tax rate (0% for no-income-tax states, flat rate where applicable, minimum marginal rate as a conservative baseline in progressive states). Topline macro estimate — not a prediction of individual tax outcomes.

MILF-segment impact
Scaled proportionally from the MILFdex 2026 2025 baseline ($150.6M creator revenue, 115,893 MILF creators) using the national Q1 2026 decline. Household-budget figures apply the OnlyGuider March 2026 survey’s 32.7% “sole source of income” rate to the 115,893 creator base.

Correlation
Pearson r computed on per-capita YoY deltas (OnlyFans search change vs AI porn search change). Full city sample n = 164. AV-excluded subsample n = 76. Statistical significance reported as two-tailed p-values. Age-verification group comparison used Welch’s t-test; AI porn YoY across AV vs non-AV states returned p = 0.39 (not significant).

Scope note
This report describes trends observed through Q1 2026 and quantifies their current and near-term financial implications. It does not forecast the long-term trajectory of any platform or technology. Absolute search volume for OnlyFans remains substantially larger than absolute search volume for AI porn in the US; this analysis focuses on the direction, pace and correlation of the two trends, not their current relative size. OnlyGuider will publish Q2, Q3 and Q4 2026 updates as the picture develops.

Copyright & Attribution

Q1 2026 Onlyfans Analysis © 2025 by Onlyguider is licensed under CC BY 4.0