Affiliate Disclosure
This site earns money when a reader signs up to a casino through one of our links. That is the whole arrangement, and this page exists to spell it out before you click anything. If you take one thing from it, take this: we are paid by some of the operators we write about, and you should read everything else on this site with that in mind.
Commission is never paid by you and never changes the price of anything you buy. It is paid by the operator, out of its own marketing budget, and only if you register and meet that operator’s qualifying conditions.
How the links work
Every outbound link to a casino on this site points at our own domain first. It
takes the form /go/<casino>/, and it is the only kind of casino
link we publish. Nothing is hard-coded to a partner’s address, which means we
can correct a broken or changed destination in one place rather than across
hundreds of pages.
When you follow one of those links, three things happen in order:
- Our server records the click. The redirect logs which casino was clicked, the time, and the IP address of the request. This is used to check that the redirects work and to see which pages are useful. It is described in full in the privacy policy.
- Your browser is forwarded to the operator. The operator then sets its own tracking cookie on its own domain. That cookie is theirs, not ours, and it is governed by their privacy policy.
- If you register and qualify, the operator pays us. The usual models are a share of the revenue the player generates or a fixed fee per depositing customer. We never see your account, your deposits, your balance or your personal details — the operator reports to us only in aggregate.
The practical consequence is that the operator knows a visit came from this site. It does not receive your name, address or payment details from us, because we never have them in the first place.
How this affects our ratings
There is a visible difference in our tables between casinos that have an agreement with us and casinos that do not. A partner gets a button that takes you through to its sign-up page. A casino we have no agreement with gets a neutral label instead, because there is nowhere useful to send you.
That difference is about whether a link exists, not about quality. Every score in every table is produced from the six criteria published on the how we rate page — licence and ownership, bonus terms in full, withdrawal terms, payment methods, player protection tools and the small print. Whether we are paid is not one of those criteria, and it is not an input into any of them.
We are not going to claim that a commercial relationship has no effect on anyone who has ever run a site like this. The tension is real and it is permanent: the casinos that pay us are, broadly, the casinos we would like you to visit. Our answer is not to deny the tension but to make the judgement checkable. The criteria are fixed in advance, the same ones are applied to every site, and the reasoning is published where you can disagree with it. A rating you can audit is worth more than a promise of objectivity you cannot.
What commission does not influence
- Position in a table. Sites are ordered by the published criteria, not by what they pay.
- The score. No operator has ever been offered, and none will be offered, a rating in exchange for money.
- Whether a casino is included at all. Several of the casinos we compare pay us nothing, and some of the ones that do are ranked below them.
- The disadvantages we list. Where a partner has a poor withdrawal limit, a short bonus expiry or a licence we would not want to rely on, we say so on the same page as the offer.
- Warnings. If we think a site is a bad idea, we say that too. We would rather lose a commission than mislead a reader into a deposit.
Why this model is normal — and what the alternative is
Affiliate commission is how almost every comparison site in this sector is funded, including the ones that do not mention it. The alternatives are not neutral either: a site funded by display advertising is reluctant to criticise its biggest advertisers, and a site funded by subscriptions reaches far fewer people. We chose the model that pays for the work without a paywall, and then chose to describe it openly rather than leave it in the footer.
Without commission, this site would not exist in its current form. There is no advertising on it, no sponsored content and no paid placement. If you would rather not use our links, that is a perfectly reasonable choice — nothing on the site is gated behind them, and the terms we quote are the operators’ own, which you can read on their sites directly.
For the criteria themselves, and how each one is weighted, see how we rate non-GamStop casinos.