Editorial Policy

Last updated: 5 May 2026

This page sets out how content on this website is produced, what standards it is held to, how it is fact-checked, and what happens when something is wrong. The policy applies to every full operator review, every comparative list, every topic guide and every help page on the site. It does not apply to material on third-party sites that we link out to; those organisations operate under their own editorial standards and we do not control their work.

1. Editorial principles

Four principles run through everything published on this site. The order matters: trust first, accuracy second, independence third, currency fourth.

• Trust. Casino content sits squarely inside what Google calls Your Money or Your Life territory: a wrong recommendation can have direct financial consequences for a reader. The cost of a mistake is high enough that the bar for publishing has to be high. Our default is “say less and say it more carefully” rather than “say more and qualify later”.
• Accuracy. Numbers are checked against primary sources rather than against other review sites. Every figure that appears in a review — bonus amount, wagering multiplier, RTP, withdrawal limit, supported payment method — is verified at the operator itself or at the regulator before publication, and the date of verification is recorded.
• Independence. No commercial relationship with an operator translates into a different rating outcome. The mechanism for keeping that wall in place is described in section 5 below and on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
• Currency. Reviews are updated when the underlying facts change, not on a marketing schedule. A two-year-old review with current data is more useful than a three-day-old review built on assumptions; freshness for its own sake is fake freshness, and Google’s ongoing quality work specifically targets the practice of moving the “updated” date without changing the content beneath it.

2. How a review is produced — step by step

The process below applies to every full operator review. Topic guides and comparative pages follow a similar but lighter version of it, scaled to the type of content. The detailed mechanics of the testing stage live on the How We Test page; this section is the editorial wrapper around that test process.

Step 1 — Selection

Operators are not reviewed at random. The list of operators considered for review is filtered by three criteria: a verifiable licence from a recognised regulator (most commonly Curaçao for offshore-licensed sites serving Australia, plus the major European regulators where relevant), availability to Australian residents, and the absence of major unresolved complaints on independent watchdog platforms. Operators with no licence at all, or with a licence that has been revoked, are not reviewed in the standard format; they are listed in the “avoid” section of comparative pages with a short explanation.

Step 2 — Testing

Each operator is tested against the eight-stage process documented on the How We Test page: pre-analysis, registration, deposit, bonus mechanics, gameplay, withdrawal, support, and mobile-and-security. Real money is used. Real signups are completed. The testing log records timestamps, screenshots and amounts, so each claim in the published review can be traced back to its source observation.

Step 3 — Drafting

The review is drafted from the testing log and the verified facts. Drafts are written to the structure described on the How We Rate page, with each rating component supported by the corresponding testing observation. Where the testing log is silent on a question that the review needs to answer (a payment method we did not use, a niche game category we did not test), the review says so explicitly rather than guessing.

Step 4 — Fact-check

Before publication, every numerical claim is re-verified against the operator’s current published terms. The cross-checks include: licence number against the regulator’s public register; bonus terms against the operator’s promotion page on the day of fact-check; wagering multiplier and game-weight schedule against the operator’s own rules; withdrawal limits and processing windows against the operator’s cashier page; supported payment methods by entering the cashier as a logged-in test user. Any discrepancy between the testing log (what we saw on day X) and the live page (what is true on the day of publication) is resolved in favour of the live page, with a note of the change in the review.

Step 5 — Publication

Reviews are published with a visible publication date, a visible last-updated date, and the rating broken out by the eight criteria so readers can see how the headline number is composed. Internal links to related guides and comparative pages are added at this stage.

Step 6 — Refresh

Reviews are scheduled for re-checking every three to six months. They are also re-checked on demand when an event triggers a refresh: an operator changes ownership, alters its bonus structure materially, loses or changes its licence, or attracts a cluster of complaints on independent watchdog platforms. The refresh either confirms the current rating or produces a new one; in either case, the last-updated date moves forward and the change is reflected in the review text.

3. Sources used for fact-checking

Five categories of source feed the verification stage. The order reflects the weight given to them in case of conflict.

• Regulator registers. For licensing claims, the public register of the licensing authority is the only authoritative source. Curaçao master-licensee databases, the Malta Gaming Authority register at mga.org.mt, the UK Gambling Commission register at gamblingcommission.gov.uk, and similar registers for other jurisdictions are consulted directly. ACMA’s register at acma.gov.au is checked for any record of complaints or blocking action against the operator.
• The operator’s own published terms. Bonus terms, withdrawal rules, supported payment methods and game weighting are taken from the operator’s own pages, not from secondary write-ups. The relevant URLs are recorded as part of the verification step so they can be re-checked at refresh time.
• Independent player-side platforms. AskGamblers (askgamblers.com), Casino Guru (casino.guru), Trustpilot, and the Reddit communities for online gambling are consulted to identify recurring complaint patterns. Single negative experiences are noise; recurring themes across independent reports are signal.
• Game-provider data. RTP figures, volatility and feature mechanics for individual slot titles are taken from the provider’s own information sheet (Pragmatic Play, NetEnt, Hacksaw Gaming, Nolimit City and others publish these directly) rather than from the operator’s lobby description.
• Industry data on testing-laboratory certification. eCOGRA, iTech Labs, GLI and similar certifications are checked at the testing laboratory’s site, not solely on the operator’s footer.

Where two sources conflict, the higher-trust source wins: regulator over operator, operator-published terms over secondary review sites, primary provider data over operator-descriptive copy.

4. Standards for content quality

Every page produced for this site is held to the standards below before it is published.

• Every numerical claim has a source recorded against it in the working draft, even if the source does not appear in the published page.
• Every operator-specific claim has a date attached. “The bonus is 100% up to A$1,000” is incomplete without a verification date. “Verified [date]” appears either on the page or in the working notes.
• Reviews include both pros and cons, and the cons section is not cosmetic. A review that lists no concrete cons fails our internal quality bar and is rewritten before publication; a 100% positive write-up is a Quality Rater red flag and a reader red flag for the same reason.
• Generic boilerplate is not used to fill space. Sentences that could appear unchanged in any review of any operator are removed at the editing stage in favour of operator-specific observations.
• Bonus arithmetic is worked out, not asserted. “Wagering of 35x means you must wager A$3,500 before withdrawal of A$100 in bonus winnings” is shown explicitly rather than left as an exercise.
• Risk language is preserved. The expected loss inherent in casino games is part of the description, not a footnote.

5. Editorial independence in practice

The wall between commercial and editorial decisions is the most important structural feature of this site. The mechanism is described in detail on the Affiliate Disclosure page; in summary: ratings are produced from the testing log and the eight-criterion framework, regardless of whether a commercial relationship exists with the operator. Partnership negotiations and rating decisions are kept in separate workflows. An operator cannot purchase a higher rating, cannot remove a low rating, cannot demand removal of a competitor’s review, and cannot edit the cons list of its own review. Requests of that kind are declined; operators that escalate them are dropped from the site.

6. Error-correction policy

Errors do happen. When they are spotted — by a reader through the channels on the Contact page, or by us during a refresh, or by an operator drawing attention to a factual issue — the policy is:

1. Acknowledge. A reported issue is reviewed within 48 hours of being received.
2. Verify. The point in dispute is checked against the primary sources listed in section 3.
3. Correct, where the report is right. The page is updated, the last-updated date is moved forward, and a short note is added to the page text describing the change (“Updated [date]: corrected the maximum withdrawal figure following operator change to its terms”).
4. Decline, where the report is wrong. If verification confirms the existing text, the page is left as it stands and a brief response goes back to the reporter through the channel they used.
5. Document material changes. Substantive changes to a rating, especially downward ones, are explained on the page rather than slipped in silently. Honest revision is more useful than the appearance of stability.

A worked example of how the policy applies. Suppose an operator review states that PayID withdrawals settle in under one hour, and a reader writes in to say their PayID withdrawal took 36 hours during a recent attempt. The first step is to retest the withdrawal flow, not to argue: a single counter-example is data, and the question to answer is whether the published claim still represents typical performance. If the retest confirms the original time, the original text stands and the reporter is told why. If the retest shows a slower window, the published number is updated, the “last updated” date is moved forward, and the rating on the withdrawal criterion is recalculated — which often shifts the headline number too. That is how a rating is supposed to move.

Pages are not deleted in response to commercial pressure. If a review changes substantially, the change is visible; if a page is removed, the URL responds with a clear status rather than disappearing without trace.

7. Standards for sourcing user-experience input

Where reader feedback influences a review — for example, a wave of reports about a specific operator’s withdrawal slowness — the sourcing rule is the same as for any other input: independent corroboration matters more than volume. Twenty identical comments on the same forum on the same day are weighted as one input. Twenty independent reports across three different platforms over a three-month period are weighted as a confirmed pattern. The role of independent reviewer-aggregator platforms is described in section 3.

8. Disclosures specific to this Editorial Policy

The site is funded by affiliate commissions; the full mechanism is on the Affiliate Disclosure page. The site is informational and does not run accounts; the mechanics are on the About page. Privacy practices for visitor data are on the Privacy Policy page. Responsible-gambling commitments and how they bind the editorial work on this site are on the Responsible Gambling page. The rating mechanics that turn testing observations into a number are on the How We Rate page; the testing process that produces the input to those mechanics is on the How We Test page.