Sister-site claims are easy to make and hard to verify. Alterplay treats every connection as a hypothesis until public-record evidence supports it. This page documents exactly how that process works — every source we use, every limitation we accept, and every check that runs before a brand appears on the site.
Last reviewed: May 2026 · Reviewed by Jordan Conroy, Licensing & Regulatory Analyst
Four principles govern every operator profile and sister-site map we publish. They are listed here so that researchers, operators, and players can hold us to them.
Operators describe themselves favourably. Marketing copy is unreliable evidence by design. Where a regulator's register, a Companies House filing, or a dated enforcement notice contradicts an operator's marketing, the public record wins. We document the contradiction.
We do not accept payment for favourable coverage. Operators do not see drafts before publication. We do not remove negative findings at commercial request. Affiliate revenue funds our research; it does not direct it.
Where the evidence is partial, we say so. Where two sources disagree, we publish both and explain the conflict. We would rather say "we don't know" than imply certainty we have not earned.
A sister-site map accurate today may be wrong in six months. Every page we publish carries a verification date. Pages older than 90 days are flagged for review. Currency is editorial, not cosmetic.
We use five primary sources. Every claim on Alterplay should be traceable to at least one of them; significant claims — operator changes, fines, ownership transfers — require corroboration from at least two.
The UKGC maintains a public register of every entity licensed to provide gambling services in the UK. We pull licence numbers, account types, regulatory action history, and trading names from this register. The register is the starting point for every operator profile we publish.
Account number, account name, licence start date, licence status (active, surrendered, revoked, lapsed), trading names, and regulatory action history including any sanctions, fines, or licence conditions.
Ultimate beneficial ownership, intra-group transactions, or the technical infrastructure shared between brands. For that we need other sources.
Every UK-incorporated licence holder files annual accounts and confirmation statements with Companies House. We use these to trace parent companies, group structures, director appointments, and shareholder histories. Companies House is also where we identify silent ownership transfers that have not yet propagated to the UKGC register.
Registered office, persons with significant control, group ownership chain, director appointments and resignations, and any insolvency or strike-off proceedings.
Companies registered outside the UK fall outside this database. Where a UK-licensed entity is owned by a foreign parent — Maltese, Cypriot, Gibraltarian, Bulgarian — we cross-reference the relevant national company registers, but the level of public disclosure varies by jurisdiction.
UKGC licence conditions require operators to disclose specific information in the footer of every site they operate: the licensed entity name, licence number, registered office address, and a link to the UKGC public register. We audit each footer against the UKGC register and Companies House. Discrepancies — wrong licence number, mismatched company name, missing address — are flagged and investigated before a brand is published on Alterplay.
We also read the full terms and conditions of every site we map. Bonus terms, withdrawal policies, dormancy rules, and complaints procedures often reveal shared infrastructure: identical wording across two apparently unrelated brands is a strong signal that the same compliance team drafted both.
Sister sites frequently share technical infrastructure even when their corporate disclosures do not make the connection obvious. We document the publicly observable signals: shared CDN endpoints, identical KYC providers, common payment-gateway integrations, matching game-lobby structures, identical session-cookie naming conventions, and shared customer-support widget configurations.
Platform fingerprinting on its own is never sufficient evidence of a sister-site relationship — two operators can legitimately use the same payment processor without sharing ownership. We use it to corroborate licence and Companies House evidence, never to substitute for it.
We accept player reports — positive and negative — about any UKGC-licensed casino. Reports are checked for authenticity against deposit timestamps, account references, and other corroborating detail before publication. We do not edit reports for tone, and we do not remove them at operator request.
Player reports are not used to establish corporate relationships. They are published as context alongside operator profiles, to surface the lived experience of using each brand.
Not all sister-site relationships are equal. Alterplay classifies every connection into one of three tiers, based on the strength of the underlying evidence. Every connection on the site is labelled with its tier; where the available evidence is ambiguous, we say so.
Two brands operate under the same UKGC licence number, registered to the same UK-incorporated company. This is the tightest possible connection: shared compliance team, shared regulatory accountability, shared self-exclusion register, and usually shared wallet infrastructure. A self-exclusion at one Tier 1 sister site should propagate automatically to every other Tier 1 sister.
Two brands operate under different UKGC licences but share an ultimate parent company — verified through Companies House or the equivalent foreign register. Compliance, payment processing, and self-exclusion may or may not be shared. Players should confirm directly before assuming propagation.
Two brands share platform technology supplied by a third party, but the brand owner of each site may be a separate company with its own UKGC licence. White-label arrangements are legitimate and common, but they create governance gaps that matter to players: a self-exclusion at one Tier 3 sister will not necessarily propagate to another, even if the underlying tech is identical.
Every brand entry on Alterplay passes through the same five-step workflow before it goes live. The same workflow runs again on every monitoring cycle.
The researcher logs every primary source consulted, including UKGC account number, Companies House registration number, terms-and-conditions URL, and platform fingerprinting notes. Sources go into the working file before any conclusion goes onto the page.
Disclosures in the operator's footer and terms are audited against the UKGC register and Companies House. Any discrepancy stops the workflow until it is resolved.
The connection is assigned to Tier 1, 2, or 3 based on the evidence assembled. Where the evidence supports one tier but not the next, we publish only what is supported.
A second researcher reviews the entry against the original sources. Reviewer and author are credited on the published page. Disagreement between researcher and reviewer sends the entry back to step 1.
The entry is published with a "last verified" date. That date governs the next monitoring cycle. The clock starts the moment the page goes live.
Brands launch, rebrand, migrate, and shut down. An operator profile that was accurate six months ago may now be wrong in material ways. Alterplay treats currency as a core editorial responsibility rather than a finishing touch.
We monitor on three cycles. The UKGC register is checked daily for licence-status changes, new sanctions, and licence revocations. Companies House filings are reviewed weekly for ownership transfers, director changes, and insolvency proceedings. Footer and terms audits are repeated quarterly across the full index, with priority brands — the largest operator groups — re-audited monthly. Every page on Alterplay carries a "last verified" date, and any page older than 90 days is automatically flagged for review.
There is a meaningful distinction between what is verifiable and what is speculation. Alterplay tries to stay on the right side of that line.
No public-records methodology is complete. Operators can structure their corporate affairs to obscure connections we cannot see. The most material limitations are these.
Where a UK-licensed entity is ultimately owned by a holding company in a jurisdiction with limited public disclosure, the chain of ownership beyond UK borders may be partial. We document what is verifiable and label the rest as such.
A licence may be sold from one entity to another within the same group without immediate public disclosure. We catch these on the next monitoring cycle, but there can be a lag of days or weeks before our records reflect the change.
The licence holder for a white-label site is the platform provider, but the brand and customer-facing operations may be controlled by a separate company that does not appear on the UKGC register at all. Where we can identify the brand owner from other public sources, we do; not every white-label is traceable in this way.
A brand launched in the past 30 days may not yet have filed accounts, may not be reflected in cross-references, and may not have generated enough player reports to corroborate its operational track record. We publish what is verifiable on launch and update on the next cycle.
If we have made a factual error, we want to know about it. Operators, players, and journalists are all welcome to flag corrections through the contact page.
We will review the underlying public records, respond within five business days, and publish a correction with a dated note where the original entry was wrong. Corrections appear on the corrected page itself, not in a separate hidden log.
We do not remove negative reports or unfavourable findings at operator request. Where an operator disputes our characterisation of an event that the public record supports, we will publish their response alongside the original entry — but we will not retract findings that the public record supports.
Alterplay's revenue comes from affiliate partnerships with licensed operators. When a player clicks through to an operator from Alterplay and registers an account, we may earn a commission. This is the standard funding model for casino comparison and research sites in the UK.
The affiliate relationship does not influence our research methodology, our tier classification, our regulatory reporting, or our willingness to publish negative findings. Operators with affiliate agreements receive the same scrutiny as those without — and several brands we cover do not partner with us at all.
Audits UKGC licence conditions, tracks enforcement actions, and stress-tests the bonus terms operators hope you won't read.
Every brand on Alterplay is the output of the workflow above. Start with the casino directory or the featured groups on the homepage.