Wouldn't such a confirmation be needed purely for legal reasons?

It's probably time for this Depression-era law to go away. I don't think there's a single person on earth that's waited until age 18 to look at porn. Why criminalize it?

I'm not a lawyer, but my guess would be no since it's merely a link to a third party. I'd guess the third party has the responsibility to ask that question.

On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer.

On the third-party point, I think that's the reason they say:

"(there seems to be no such confirmation found on at least some of the redirected porn sites)."

The redirect he was suggesting wasn't to thwart 16-year-old boys from finding porn. It would be to make sure you don't accidentally stumble into something you don't want via a fat-fingered search query.

I'm going to hope that pun (porn and xxx being fat-fingered) was unintentional.