Editorial Policy
The rules below cover the editorial baseline Pub Casino sticks to across reviews, topic guides and comparative pages. The point of publishing them is to give readers a written yardstick rather than relying on whichever judgement call happens to feel sensible on a given day. Background on who runs the operation sits over on the About page, while the headline operator review is hosted on the Pub Casino homepage. Any procedure outlined here — building a review, fact-checking, handling corrections, keeping pages fresh — gets followed for every piece of content the site puts out.
1. Editorial independence
The cash that keeps Pub Casino running comes from affiliate commissions — paid when a reader follows an outbound link to an operator and chooses to register there. The nuts and bolts of that arrangement live on the Affiliate Disclosure page. From an editorial standpoint the principle is straightforward: a partnership cannot buy a higher rating, and the absence of one cannot drag a score down. The same rating framework is run identically against every operator that goes through a full Pub Casino review. We've handed partner operators scores at six or below, and we've handed non-partner operators scores at eight or above. Sales, marketing and editorial run as separate tracks; the editorial side carries the final call on every published score.
2. Sources we trust
Every piece of Pub Casino content pulls from four source types, ordered here by how much weight each one carries.
- Hands-on testing. Reviews are built from real accounts on operator platforms, using genuine deposits and live withdrawal requests. This is the main source for everything in a review aside from verifiable third-party facts.
- Regulator and government records. Anything legally binding — licence status, corporate ownership filings, an entry in the UKGC register, GAMSTOP records, references to the Gambling Act 2005 — comes from here. Treated as authoritative for any legal point made anywhere on Pub Casino.
- Independent player-community evidence. Reputation over months and years pulled from AskGamblers, Casino Guru, Trustpilot, plus relevant Reddit threads and dedicated gambling forums. This material acts as a cross-check against our own hands-on findings rather than as a standalone source.
- Operator-supplied content. Press kits, marketing pages, partner briefings. Read to add context, never repeated as independently confirmed material. Any figure that traces back to the operator is flagged in the review as such.
3. Fact-checking
Before going live, every operator review clears a four-step fact-check. Step 1 — the licence claim gets cross-referenced against the regulator's public register. Step 2 — bonus mechanics are recalculated from the operator's published T&Cs and matched against the headline figure on the marketing page, with any gap noted in the review. Step 3 — payment methods, withdrawal speeds and minimum-deposit figures are verified against the live cashier instead of the FAQ, which often disagrees with itself. Step 4 — catalogue claims are spot-tested against specific studios and specific titles to confirm the marketing reflects what the lobby actually contains.
Anything numeric that tends to move — bonus mechanics, withdrawal ceilings, the minimum deposit figure — gets flagged inside our internal tracker and recycled through the verification schedule listed below. When a recheck turns up a number that has shifted since the last pass, three things happen at once: the review picks up the new figure, the date stamp at the top of the page moves forward, and a short dated note goes onto the bottom of the review explaining what was updated.
4. Quotation, paraphrase and attribution
Verbatim quotation only happens when the precise wording counts — official regulator notices, the binding text of terms and conditions, anything from court filings. For everything else, paraphrasing is the default, with the source called out inline. Operator marketing copy gets rewritten in our own register; press releases never get republished under the Pub Casino byline. When a third-party figure appears — a Trustpilot score, a complaint count from AskGamblers — the source is named and a working link to it is included.
For any statistical claim involving gambling harm, enforcement activity or the scale of the UK's online casino market, the figures trace back to government data, academic work or peer-reviewed research. Industry-association numbers go in only when an independent source backs them up.
5. Authorship and AI assistance
Each piece on Pub Casino carries a named human writer or editor behind it. AI assistance is permitted, but only inside a tightly scoped sandbox: roughing out a structure, compressing long source documents, polishing grammar, brainstorming headline variants. AI is not the source for analytical material — scores, the strengths/weaknesses readout, comparative judgements — and is never used to invent quotes or testing outcomes. Whenever a factual claim originates from an AI tool, it gets verified against an independent source before publication; the citation goes to that independent source, not the AI.
6. Corrections and updates
How a correction gets handled depends on how serious the error is, split across three tiers.
- Minor — a typo, a stale link, a stray formatting glitch: cleaned up quietly inside one working day.
- Substantive — any fact, number or claim that meaningfully shifts a reader's decision: fixed within five working days, with a dated note at the bottom of the page explaining what changed and why. The previous wording lives on in our internal version log but doesn't appear back on the public page.
- Material (an error big enough to change the on the whole verdict, or a regulatory development that affects multiple operators): corrected within two business days, with a prominent banner at the top of the page for no less than 30 days, and an entry on a dedicated corrections log accessible from this page.
Anyone spotting what looks like a factual mistake on a Pub Casino page can raise it through the Contact page. Serious complaints get logged against the affected review even if, on inspection, no correction ends up being needed.
7. Freshness
Each operator review goes through a complete refresh on at least a yearly cycle, with the high-traffic data points — bonus terms, withdrawal speeds, supported payment methods — verified every quarter. Topic guides and procedural pages get the same annual cycle. The "Last updated" stamp at the top of a page is tied to the last factual revision, not to whatever was the latest typo fix.
8. Conflict of interest
People on the Pub Casino editorial team aren't allowed to own equity in, draw consulting fees from, or hold personal affiliate ties with any operator they personally cover in a review. As soon as a possible conflict comes up, the writer is moved to a different operator and the swap is logged in our internal tracker. The partnerships on file at the site level — listed on the Affiliate Disclosure page — are run operationally as a separate stream from editorial; they aren't personal arrangements between writers and brands.
9. Reader safety
The product set covered on Pub Casino is for adults only. Three editorial commitments flow from that. One — no Pub Casino page treats gambling as a way to earn money; the framing is consistently "paid entertainment that carries a real downside". Two — every operator review and every comparison page links to Responsible Gambling tools and the appropriate UK helplines, as visible body content rather than as a footnote. Three — no Pub Casino page directs language, imagery or examples at under-18s, people with gambling problems, or anyone who has self-excluded. Where an operator's marketing crosses any of these lines, the review calls it out and the score reflects the breach.
10. Complaints, escalation and right of reply
An operator unhappy with a Pub Casino rating is free to email the editorial inbox setting out a specific factual claim along with the evidence behind it. Three outcomes can follow. Outcome one — the claim holds up: the review gets updated and a correction note is appended at the bottom. Outcome two — part of the claim holds up: that portion goes into the review, the rest stays as published, and the reasoning lands in our internal log. Outcome three — the claim doesn't hold up: the review stands as is, and the operator gets the reasoning in writing. Pre-publication negotiation over the score is not something we engage in under any circumstances.
Where a reader has a concern about how Pub Casino is operating editorially, the escalation route is the Contact page; complaints touching individual reviews get a reply inside five working days. Anything about how we handle your data sits under the Privacy Policy page, paired with the technical detail on the Cookie Policy page.