Editorial standards

Last updated 2026-06-04 · Maintained by James Wenton

Bylines and accountability

Every page carries a named author and a named fact-checker. The fact-checker is Helena Marchetti for every commercial page. The author is the market lead for the page's locale — Marcus Reed for the US, Antonio Conti for Italy, Sophie Hartley for the UK, and so on. The full team is documented at our editorial team, where you can read each person's background and what they're authoritative on.

If a page is wrong, the byline is who to write to. We don't hide behind a generic "team" attribution.

Sources we trust, sources we don't

The hierarchy of evidence we work from, in order of weight:

1. Primary documents. Regulator registers (MGA, UKGC, Curaçao GCB, ANJ, KSA, GGL, Spillemyndigheden), official statutes (UIGEA, GlüStV, Decreto Dignità, KOA, MitID law), operator licence pages with verifiable numbers.
2. Our own tests. Dated deposit/withdrawal logs, support response timings, KYC document requests we received personally. Logs are kept by the editor who ran the test.
3. Established industry sources. established gambling-industry trade press and published research. We treat these as sources to cross-check, not as authority on their own.
4. Independent player communities. AskGamblers, CasinoMeister complaint boards. Useful for trend signal and dispute resolution; we read them, we don't republish them.

We do not cite other affiliate sites. We do not lift content from operator marketing. We do not use AI-generated bonus claims or invented testimonials.

The writing process

Each commercial page goes through four phases before publication:

1. Brief. The market lead writes a brief — primary keyword, secondary cluster from research, target word count anchored to the strongest competitor's length, the editorial angle. The brief lives in the repo as a markdown file and is referenced on every revision.
2. Testing. Real-money deposit-and-withdrawal cycles on every operator that ends up on the page. Times are logged with dates. Documents requested at withdrawal are noted. The market lead does the testing personally.
3. Writing. Drafted to the brief, in the market lead's voice (per the per-person voice DNA in our internal style guide), with citations linked inline to primary sources.
4. Fact-check and EIC sign-off. Helena Marchetti reviews for regulatory accuracy and responsible-gambling tone. James Wenton signs off on the structural and editorial-independence criteria. Both names appear on the byline.

Corrections

Errors we identify ourselves are corrected silently if minor (typo, formatting), with a dated note if material (changed claim, removed paragraph). Errors flagged by readers go through the same process and the original reporter is credited on the dated note where they want to be. Substantial revisions touch the page's "Last updated" stamp.

If an operator's circumstances change between cycles — payout speed slips, dispute count rises, licence lapses — we update before the next scheduled re-test rather than waiting. Operators are re-rated, and where the change is severe, removed from the toplist.

AI policy

We use modern AI tools (large language models, transcript tools, research assists) for the same reasons other newsrooms do: speed up first-draft outlines, summarise long source documents, catch typos. We do not let an AI tool write a published page end-to-end, generate test data, or invent quotes. Where an AI tool meaningfully helped with a section, the byline editor is responsible for verifying every factual claim in that section as if it had been hand-written.

Conflicts of interest

Our editors do not hold equity in any operator we cover, and do not accept gifts, comped trips, or paid junkets from operators. The site is owned by its editorial team and is operated outside any jurisdiction whose regulators it covers. The full ownership disclosure lives on the About page.

Get in touch

If something on the site is wrong, write to [email protected]. If we cite something the source doesn't say, write to [email protected]. The complaints process is documented at How We Rate alongside the scoring methodology.