The advertising rules a gambling review page has to follow

A page that recommends a gambling operator is advertising, whatever it calls itself. That has consequences for what it may say, and the consequences fall on the licensed operator as well as on the publisher. We are setting out the rules we work to, partly because readers are entitled to know them and partly because they explain several things about this site that would otherwise look like omissions.

Two regimes apply at once

The licence conditions require a licensed operator to take responsibility for those who market on its behalf. An affiliate is not a third party the operator can disclaim: if a partner site makes a claim, the licensee answers for it. Separately, the advertising itself falls under the Advertising Standards Authority and the CAP code, which governs marketing communications generally and has specific content rules for gambling.

The practical effect is that a review page has two readers it must satisfy before the human one — and that a page which would embarrass the operator it promotes is a liability to that operator rather than a service.

What cannot be said

• “Risk-free”, or any synonym for it. A promotion with a stake, a wagering requirement or a time limit is not risk-free, and the phrase is the single most reliable marker of a page that has not read the rules.
• Anything aimed at, or likely to appeal to, people under 18. This covers more than words: imagery, characters, and the general register of a page all count, which is why gambling advertising looks the way it does.
• Terms that are not the current terms. A wagering multiple above ten times cannot be offered to British customers since 19 January 2026, so a page still printing 35x is not merely stale, it is advertising something unavailable. The same date banned promotions mixing casino and betting, which retires a whole family of offer descriptions — the detail is in our piece on reading the wagering clause.
• A licence status that has not been checked. Describing an operator as licensed when its licence has lapsed is a factual claim that has gone wrong, and it happens constantly — our piece on checking a licence number against the register has the case of an operator still being described as licensed more than a year after it gave the licence up.

What has to be present

The signposting, in the same place on every page: the age restriction, and the routes to help — 18+, BeGambleAware, GAMSTOP, GamCare, and the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133. It is a licence requirement for the operator and the plain minimum for anybody writing about the subject. What that scheme reaches, and the places it does not, are in what GAMSTOP covers.

What follows for this site

Several things, and they are visible in what is not here. We do not print figures for an operator’s payout speed or an individual game’s return, because we cannot verify either and a number we cannot verify is a claim we would be answering for. We do not describe a licence as current unless the register has been checked. We state the arithmetic we have derived and name our assumptions when we make them. And when there is no source for a figure, the sentence goes without the figure rather than acquiring an estimate.

That last rule costs the most. It is why our piece on what decides how long a withdrawal takes describes the two clocks and refuses to give a number of hours, and why the older material we inherited on what casinos would rather you did not know reads as a set of questions rather than a league table. A review page that follows the rules is less exciting than one that does not, and it is the only kind worth reading twice.