Transparency is one of the five sub-scores on every affiliate card in AffPapa’s Top 100 iGaming affiliates directory. Operators weigh transparency when they choose partners, and players weigh transparency when they decide which review site to believe. The signals below come from the public pages of four large affiliates (Casino.org, Gambling.com, Bojoko and Casinospesialisten) plus a smaller single-market site, Kasinohai, to see whether the signals hold outside the biggest brands. All five sites were checked in October 2026.
No single signal proves an affiliate is trustworthy. Together, the five signals show whether a site lets readers check its work or simply asks to be believed.
1. The site says how it earns money
An affiliate is paid by the casinos it writes about, and a trustworthy site says so in plain words. Gambling.com’s editorial guidelines state: “we may earn commission from our partners when you visit their sites through our links.” Bojoko’s guidelines are just as direct: “We are an affiliate website, which gets financial compensation by directing traffic to online casinos.” Casinospesialisten’s homepage tells Norwegian readers that the site receives compensation from several of the casinos it writes about.
What to check: a disclosure written in full sentences and placed on the review pages themselves, not only in a footer link.
2. The review method is published in detail
A star rating means little until the reader knows what produced the rating. Casino.org describes a 25-step review process covering game portfolios, site security, fairness and withdrawal speeds. Gambling.com goes a step further and publishes the weight of each scoring category: Games (30 points), Responsible Gambling (20), Promotions (15), Banking (15), User Experience (10) and Customer Support (10), for a total of 100.
What to check: whether the method page lets a reader understand why one casino scored higher than another.
3. Testers use real money
Bonus terms and withdrawal times only show up properly when someone deposits and withdraws. Gambling.com says testing starts by “depositing real money to assess how secure and straightforward the process is,” and Bojoko’s homepage states: “We use real money for deposits and withdrawals.”
What to check: whether reviews record concrete results from the test, such as payout times and the verification steps the tester went through.
4. Mistakes are logged in public
Most large affiliates promise to fix errors, and several invite readers to report them. Gambling.com asks readers to flag errors by email and says “We review all flagged material promptly and make corrections where necessary.” Casino.org’s guidelines say “reported errors will be reviewed and corrected wherever necessary.” Neither site shows readers what was changed.
A public corrections log is rarer. Kasinohai keeps one for its research section, where changed figures are logged rather than fixed silently. The site’s methodology page adds that any figure the team could not reproduce before publication was cut.
What to check: a dated page that lists what changed and why.
5. Claims are backed by evidence a reader can check
Many affiliates support their claims with other people’s research, and a named source with a link is the minimum to expect. Bojoko’s homepage, for example, cites H2 Gambling Capital’s UK Illegal Online Gambling Market Analysis: 2025-2031 and links to the report itself, so readers can check the figure at its source.
Fewer affiliates publish original data. Of the five sites checked, Kasinohai was the only one found releasing studies with their underlying tables. Three of the site’s studies, published between August 4 and August 18, 2026, show what to look for in any affiliate’s research.
The first thing to look for is a list of what was thrown out. Signup times taken from affiliate postbacks look precise, but late confirmations can inflate them. One study of casino signup speed, published in August 2026, set aside 39% of signals as delivery lag before reporting a median of 13.4 minutes from ad click to confirmed account, and explained the cut in the text.
Good research also says what it could not prove. When 137 of 3,118 casino signups referred by the site were flagged as VPN or proxy traffic, 85 turned out to come from Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, a privacy feature that keeps the user in their real region. The finding matters for the fraud filters described in AffPapa’s guide to common affiliate fraud schemes and how to prevent them. The researchers still stopped short of saying casinos penalize iPhone users, and reported finding no public case of an operator freezing an account over Private Relay.
The hardest test is a result the publisher would rather not have found. Bonuses are what a casino comparison site lists and earns from, so a finding that only five of 733 bonus offers would meet Finland’s incoming 5x cap on wagering requirements works directly against the site that published it.
What to check: whether a study lists what was removed, states its limits and includes results that work against the publisher.
Checking an affiliate: FAQs
Which signal is quickest to check?
The commission disclosure. A trustworthy affiliate states how it is paid in one or two sentences that a reader can find without searching.
Does a public corrections log mean a site makes more mistakes?
No. Every publisher makes mistakes. A corrections log shows which ones were found and fixed, which a reader cannot see on a site that corrects pages silently.
Can a site score well on all five signals and still be biased?
Yes. The signals show whether a site’s work can be checked, not whether every rating is right. Comparing an affiliate’s ratings with the casino’s own published terms is still the final test.
