How we score casinos

What we measure

Every casino in a VegasHunter ranking is scored against six signals. Each signal is a number from 0 to 10. The signals are weighted, summed, and the result is the casino's final score.

The signals:

• Editorial score (30%) — our review's overall verdict, the product of patient observation across bonus terms, payouts, support response times, mobile experience and licence integrity.
• Competitor consensus (20%) — the weighted average of ratings published by AskGamblers, Casino.guru and other independent consumer-review platforms. We only count sources that have actually rated the casino; missing sources never get imputed.
• Market fit (15%) — a heuristic check against the locale's market: native currency support, a localised regulator (where applicable), localised payment methods, mobile-first, fast payouts.
• Commercial value (15%) — the partner contract's CPA value, normalised to 0–10. Always disclosed inline via a "PARTNER" or "FEATURED" badge on the ranking card. Never hidden in a footnote.
• Traffic signal (10%) — log-normalised organic traffic from public Semrush data. Captures popularity in a way that doesn't let one extremely-trafficked operator monopolise the score.
• Recency (10%) — a linear decay over twelve months. A review last revisited eleven months ago scores roughly half what a review revisited last week scores. Forces the editorial flywheel to keep our verdicts current.

Missing data: dropped, never imputed

If a casino has no Semrush traffic export, no independent consumer-review rating, or no published review yet, we drop the missing input from the formula for that casino and renormalise the remaining weights to sum to 1.0. New operators with thin data are not penalised by zero-imputation; they're simply judged on what we can verify. The audit file emitted with every build records exactly which inputs each casino's position was based on.

Featured slots and boosts

Some ranking configurations pin casinos to the top ("featured") or apply a small post-scoring multiplier ("boost"). Featured slots and boosted positions always carry a visible badge on the casino card. We treat editorial transparency as a non-negotiable part of E-E-A-T compliance: a reader who pays attention can tell exactly when a partner relationship has lifted a result.

Per-locale weight overrides

Default weights (30/20/15/15/10/10) apply to most rankings, but each ranking config can override them — DE rankings, for example, weight market fit higher because German regulator nuance matters more, and proportionally lower commercial value to avoid distorting expectations in a market with strict advertising rules.

What we refuse to measure

We do not factor in any of the following: a casino's social-media following; the prestige of its background imagery; whether the operator has bought anyone in our team a drink at iGB; or any signal a casino cannot improve by serving its players better.

Auditing the formula

Every change to weights, featured slots, or boosts goes through a version-controlled pull request with a written reason field. The methodology page is version-stamped (currently v1.0 — effective April 2026) so readers can pin our claims to a specific moment in time. If you spot a result that doesn't square with what you see, tell us — we read ev