ASA & CAP 2025 Annual Report – platform priorities for 2026

The question

What does the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) 2025 annual report (the Report) mean for online platforms and ad tech businesses operating in the UK?

The key takeaway

The ASA is accelerating proactive, AI-assisted enforcement and, through the implementation of the Intermediary and Platform Principles (IPP) framework, aims to raise expectations on platforms to support its mission of safeguarding standards in advertising.

The background

The ASA regulates UK advertising across media and increasingly positions itself as a proactive, preventative regulator, shifting resource from reactive complaints to monitoring and targeted interventions. The 2025 annual report highlights that in 2012 the ASA spent 5% of their regulatory resource on proactive work and 67% on reactive casework. By the end of 2025, this has shifted to 45% on proactive work and 38% on reactive casework.

In 2025 it resolved over 40,000 complaints about 25,397 ads. By contrast, nearly 60 million ads were proactively scanned by the ASA's Active Ad Monitoring system, a significant increase from the 28 million scanned in 2024. This combined approach resulted in the amendment or removal of 22,383 ads in 2025. These figures highlight the trajectory of the ASA's priorities. Following their significant results of 2025, the ASA continues to focus on using AI to increase the speed, scale, and accuracy of their regulatory casework.

The development

AI-enabled monitoring at scale (and human-led enforcement): The Active Ad Monitoring system processed nearly 60 million online ads in the last year, using AI to flag risks, with expert human review determining outcomes. For platforms, this reinforces that “invisible” compliance failures which may have traditionally been recognised as "low risk", and not attracting complaints, are increasingly likely to be detected through monitoring rather than consumer reporting.

Stronger focus on platform accountability: The ASA has continued work on its IPP framework, engaging more social media and demand-side platforms, and anticipates formalising the framework in 2026 to drive greater transparency and accountability in online ad regulation. While the report does not set out the finalised obligations, the direction of travel is clear: platforms will be expected to evidence scalable controls and not solely rely on reactive enforcement.

Priority enforcement themes: POMs, influencer disclosure, and alcohol: This year's report highlights the ASA's proactive scrutiny of online advertising in areas seen as detrimental to consumers, particularly for children and other vulnerable groups, including: prescription-only medicines (POMs) (notably weight-loss injections), influencer ad disclosure, and alcohol advertising. The report summarises the ASA's engagement with these priority enforcement themes, including:

• the results of the Alcohol Pulse Report (covered in our Winter 2025 Snapshots here) which found high overall compliance (96%) for alcohol advertisements but a small number of recurring edge issues (e.g. alcohol-free product labelling);
• the results of the Influencer Ad Disclosure Report, which monitors influencer disclosure compliance, showing improved (but still inconsistent) disclosure (57% compliant but 34% with no disclosure at all);
• the ASA's precedent-setting rulings confirming that injectable weight-loss treatments are POMs and cannot be advertised to the public (including via indirect cues).

Why is this important?

For major platforms, the ASA’s model increasingly resembles a system of continuous supervision: large-scale monitoring, thematic sweeps and follow-up action, rather than case-by-case complaint adjudication.  This increases operational risk where a business's policy, review tooling and enforcement processes do not align with the ASA's shifting priorities and compliance criteria.

Any practical tips?

Platforms should keep up to date with the ASA’s priority enforcement themes and both:

• use internal review tooling and product controls to help ensure that advertisers and creators are publishing compliant ads, and keep clear audit records to evidence the preventative steps taken and their outcomes; and
• map product and content risk areas to those indicated as hot topics by the ASA and stress-test detection/appeals workflows for speed and consistency.

Platforms should also prepare their internal governance teams to engage with the ASA’s anticipated formalisation of the IPP in 2026, including readiness to implement evidence controls and reporting.

Summer 2026