The register, every day

Every morning we download the Gambling Commission's public business register: licensed companies, their licences, trading names and the domain names they declare. We keep our own copy and compare it with the previous day. A domain added to the register appears on our new sites page the same morning; a domain the register drops is marked as no longer listed, and its page says so.

The register does not say which licence covers which domain, so the licence types we show for a site are those held by the company that lists it.

Researching a site

For each consumer site we read the site itself: the welcome offer and its full terms, payment and withdrawal rules, support contacts and the games on offer. Then we look at what players report on Trustpilot, Casino Guru, AskGamblers, Reddit and the app stores, and summarise the patterns we find, with the numbers and the source of each.

Anything we could not confirm is left out rather than guessed. Every section of a profile lists the pages it is based on, and each profile shows the date we last checked it. New sites are researched within two days of appearing in the register; profiles older than about two months are checked again.

Checked before publishing

A profile is published only after an editor has reviewed it. Offer descriptions keep the significant terms (wagering, time limits, caps) next to the headline. Offers change often: the operator's own terms always take precedence over our summary.

Reader comments

Readers can share their own experience of a site. A moderator reads every comment before it appears; see the comment rules.

Data licence

Register data is published by the Gambling Commission under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Brand names are used only to identify the sites described and belong to their owners.