Check the licence on the regulator’s own public register before anything else. Find the operating company name and licence number in the site footer, open the regulator’s register directly rather than clicking the seal, search by the website address, and confirm the status reads as active. You can then use an online casino comparison on gamerules.com to compare secondary factors such as bonuses, game selection, payment methods, and usability. Every other consideration is reversible. Licensing is what decides whether you have any recourse at all when something goes wrong.
That sequence takes about two minutes and it is the part most guides skip past in a single sentence before moving on to welcome offers. What follows sets out which sources answer the licensing question, how to consult each one, and where each source will mislead you.
What does a licence give you that an unlicensed site cannot?
A licence creates an accountable counterparty. Behind it sits a named legal entity, a regulator with suspension and revocation powers, mandatory anti-money-laundering and identity checks, a formal complaints route, and access to self-exclusion schemes. Remove the licence and none of those exist. There is nobody to complain to and no mechanism that compels payment.
This matters more than it did five years ago because the alternative has grown. An investigation by Investigate Europe, published with the Guardian in March 2026, found that recommendations for sites without a national licence circulate widely, and iGaming Business reported that several of the sites suggested appear on European regulators’ blacklists. The operators involved market themselves on fast withdrawals, anonymity and large bonuses, which are exactly the features that regulation constrains.
Which regulators let you check an operator yourself?
The three registers a general reader is most likely to need are the British, Maltese and Curaçao ones, and each is searchable without an account.
The Gambling Commission maintains a register of every gambling business licensed in Great Britain, updated daily and downloadable in full as Excel or CSV. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain name or account number. The domain search is the useful one, because a brand name can be shared, borrowed or faked, whereas the URL in your browser bar cannot. The Commission also publishes a separate register of regulatory action taken against licensees, which tells you whether an operator has been penalised and for what.
The Malta Gaming Authority register is searchable by licensee name, website address, authorisation status and gaming service. Status is not binary. An entry can read licensed, surrendered, cancelled, suspended, expired, suspended expired or temporarily non-operative, and only the first means the operator is currently authorised. Confirm you are looking at a B2C gaming service licence rather than a B2B critical supply licence, because the second covers software suppliers and does not authorise anyone to take your deposit. Maltese licensees display a dynamic seal that links back to the register entry, so a static logo image with no working link is itself a warning.
The Curaçao Gaming Authority now issues licences directly and records them in a public register. It also publishes warnings about fraudulent operators, and in February 2026 it named a site displaying a fake digital authorisation seal, advising the public to verify licences only through the official database.
Why a Curaçao seal no longer means what older guides say
Curaçao rewrote its gambling law and most published advice has not caught up. The National Ordinance on Games of Chance, known as the LOK, came into force on 24 December 2024 and dissolved the master and sub-licence system that had operated since the 1990s.
Under the old arrangement, four private master licence holders sold sub-licences at their own discretion, with minimal oversight. Those four intermediaries no longer exist. Legacy sub-licences expired at the start of January 2025, the old orange seals stopped being valid in October 2025, and physical presence requirements applied from January 2026. There is no grandfather provision. An operator still trading on a former sub-licence without completing the transition to a direct licence is not lightly regulated, it is unlicensed.
The practical consequence for a reader is that any guide that describes Curaçao licensing through Antillephone, Gaming Curaçao or a master licence number was written about a system that has been dismantled. Treat the whole page as out of date, not the single paragraph.
How should you read a review guide?
Read it knowing how it is funded. Casino comparison sites are paid by operators, typically a fee for each player who registers and deposits, a share of that player’s losses over the life of the account, or a combination of the two. That model is legal and widely disclosed, but it puts commercial pressure on the running order of any list titled best or top ten.
Two checks separate a guide worth reading from one that is advertising with headings. First, find the advertising disclosure page. If there is not one, or it is vague about whether placement is sold, assume every position is paid. Second, look for a stated methodology and evidence of criticism. A guide that never says anything negative about any operator it lists is not testing anything.
Regulators have started treating this as their problem too. In Great Britain the Gambling Commission holds licensees responsible for what an affiliate publishes on their behalf, which means an unexplained top ten is a compliance exposure for the operator named in it. Google moved in the same direction on 24 July 2026, adding a guideline to its review snippet documentation covering fake and undisclosed incentivised reviews.
Review sites earn their place in the areas a register cannot cover: withdrawal times observed in practice, how bonus terms behave when you try to clear them, and how support responds. Use them for that, and use the regulator for the licence.
Can you ask an AI assistant to find one for you?
Not for the recommendation itself. An investigation by Investigate Europe, published with the Guardian and other partners in March 2026, tested seven leading chatbots across ten European countries over two weeks. In roughly three quarters of replies the assistants recommended gambling sites not licensed in Europe, describing them as secure, fast or well suited to new players. Of thirty prompts put to each platform, Meta AI returned an unlicensed recommendation twenty-seven times, Gemini twenty-six and ChatGPT twenty-two.
The same reporting found assistants explaining how to work around self-exclusion schemes and identity checks, and presenting sites with no identity verification as desirable. Only two of the tools tested opened with a warning about gambling risk. The problem is structural rather than a single bug. Language models absorb the marketing text that unlicensed operators publish in volume, then reproduce its framing when asked which site is best.
There is still a sensible way to use these tools. Ask an assistant to explain what a particular licence type covers, to summarise how a regulator’s complaints procedure works, or to tell you which authority licenses gambling in a given jurisdiction. Ask it for a checklist. Then do the verification yourself. Never accept a licence number, a company name or a claim that a site is regulated from a model without opening the register and confirming it. Models produce plausible identifiers that do not exist, and a fabricated licence number looks identical to a real one.
The order to do this in
Open the site and scroll to the footer, where licensing statements are usually placed, sometimes in an about page or the terms instead. Note the operating company name, not the brand, along with the licence number and the issuing authority. Leave the site and go to the regulator directly by typing its address rather than following the seal, since a seal is an image the site controls. Search the register by domain name where the register supports it. Confirm the status is active, confirm the licence is a consumer-facing one, and confirm the authority covers the country you are in, because a licence issued in one jurisdiction does not authorise service everywhere. Finish in the enforcement register to see whether action has been taken.
If any step fails, or you cannot find licensing details at all, that is the answer.
What a licence does not do
It does not change the mathematics. Every game carries a house edge and a licence guarantees the games are tested and the odds are as stated, not that the outcome favours you. It does not make an operator legal in your country. It does not remove the risk of gambling itself.
The protections that address that last point sit alongside licensing rather than inside it. Great Britain runs GAMSTOP for online self-exclusion and SENSE for land-based casinos, and other regulated markets operate their own national schemes. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, free and open 24 hours a day.
Which of these sources do you currently reach for first when you are checking an operator?
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