Editorial Policy
What follows are the documented rules behind everything Kinghills publishes — the reviews, the guides, the head-to-head pages. Writing them down means a reader can pin us to a fixed standard instead of trusting our judgement to stay consistent from one week to the next. If you want the people-and-purpose backdrop, the About page handles that, and the main casino assessment lives at the Kinghills Casino homepage. Any workflow named on this page — how a review is built, how facts are verified, how corrections work, how often things are refreshed — governs every piece of content we put out, no exceptions.
1. Editorial independence
Kinghills is funded by affiliate commissions earned when readers click through to an operator and decide to register there. The full mechanics are on the Affiliate Disclosure page. Editorially, the rule is brief: a partnership doesn't buy a higher rating, and the lack of one doesn't drag a score down. A consistent rating framework is applied identically to every operator given a full Kinghills review. We've scored partner operators at six and below, and operators with no commercial relationship at eight and above. Sales, marketing and editorial run as separate workflows; the editorial team has the final word on every published score.
2. Sources we trust
Kinghills content draws on four kinds of source, ranked by weight.
- Hands-on testing. Reviews come from real accounts on operator platforms, using genuine deposits and genuine withdrawal requests. This is the primary source for everything in a review bar verifiable third-party facts.
- Regulator and government records. Licensing status, ownership filings, UKGC register entries, GAMSTOP records, Gambling Act 2005 references. These are the authoritative source for any legal claim made on Kinghills.
- Independent player-community evidence. Long-term reputation across AskGamblers, Casino Guru, Trustpilot, plus Reddit and dedicated player forums. Used to sanity-check testing results, not as a primary source in its own right.
- Operator-supplied content. Press releases, marketing pages, partnership briefings. These are read for context but never cited as though independently verified. Where a figure comes from the operator, the review says so.
3. Fact-checking
No review goes live until it clears four verification stages. The first confirms the stated licence by looking it up on the regulator's public register. The second reworks the bonus maths straight from the published terms and holds the result against the headline number the marketing quotes, noting any gap in the write-up. The third tests the advertised banking options, payout times and deposit minimums against the live cashier instead of the FAQ, since those two sources frequently clash. The fourth samples the advertised game library — specific studios, specific titles — to make sure the lobby actually backs up the promotion.
Figures prone to changing — the shape of a bonus, caps on withdrawals, the smallest allowed deposit — are flagged inside our tracking system and revisited on the timetable set out below. Where one has shifted since last time, three things follow: the body of the review is corrected, the timestamp up top is refreshed, and a brief dated line goes in at the bottom recording exactly what moved.
4. Quotation, paraphrase and attribution
Direct quotation is kept for material where the exact wording matters: regulator notices, official terms and conditions, court documents. Paraphrase is the default everywhere else, with the source named in-line. Operator marketing copy is reworded in our own voice; we don't republish operator press releases as Kinghills content. Where a third-party number is reported — a Trustpilot rating, an AskGamblers complaint count — the source is named and a working link supplied.
Whenever we cite a statistic — on the harm caused by gambling, on how the regulator enforces its rules, or on how big the British online-casino market actually is — the figure traces back to a government body, a university study, or a peer-reviewed paper. Numbers that originate with a trade association make the cut only when something independent backs them up.
5. Authorship and AI assistance
Every Kinghills article is written by a named human writer or editorial-team member. AI tools may help with narrow tasks: drafting outlines, summarising long source documents, checking grammar, suggesting alternative headlines. AI tools are not used to generate the analytical content of a review — the score, the strengths-and-weaknesses summary, the comparative judgement — or to invent quotes or testing results. Any factual claim that began in an AI tool is checked against an independent source before publication, and that source is cited rather than the AI tool.
6. Corrections and updates
Corrections fall into three tiers, according to how serious the error is.
- Minor (typo, broken link, formatting glitch): corrected silently within one business day.
- Substantive (a fact, number or claim that materially affects a reader's decision): corrected within five business days, with a dated note added at the foot of the page setting out what changed and why. The original wording is retained in our internal version history but not republished.
- Material (an error big enough to change the overall verdict, or a regulatory development affecting multiple operators): corrected within two business days, with a prominent banner at the top of the page for at least 30 days, and an entry on a dedicated corrections log reachable from this page.
Readers who think a Kinghills page contains an error can flag it via the Contact page. Substantive complaints are logged against the relevant review whether or not a correction follows.
7. Freshness
A full re-read of any casino review happens on at least a yearly cycle, while the figures most likely to drift — bonus structures, payout speeds, accepted banking — get a fresh look every three months. How-to guides and the pages explaining our method are revisited once a year. One thing about the "Last updated" stamp at the head of each page: it marks the latest genuine factual review, not some trivial typo fix made in passing.
8. Conflict of interest
Kinghills editorial team members hold no equity in, take no consulting fees from, and keep no paid affiliate relationships with operators they personally review. Where a possible conflict arises, the writer is moved to a different operator and the reassignment is logged in our internal tracking. The site-level partnerships listed on the Affiliate Disclosure page are operational, not personal, and run on a separate workflow from editorial.
9. Reader safety
The subject matter here is an adult product, and three editorial rules follow from that. To begin with, nothing we publish casts gambling as a way to earn money; it is consistently presented as paid entertainment that carries the risk of loss. On top of that, each casino review and each comparison page carries prominent links — not buried footnotes — to Responsible Gambling resources and the appropriate UK helplines. Finally, no wording, image or example on the site is pitched toward under-18s, those struggling with gambling, or anyone who has self-excluded. Should an operator's own marketing breach any of these, the review flags it and the score takes the hit.
10. Complaints, escalation and right of reply
Operators that disagree with a Kinghills rating may write to the editorial address with a specific factual claim and supporting evidence. Three outcomes are possible: the claim is correct, the review is updated, and a correction note is added; the claim is partly correct, the review is updated for the verified portion while the rest stands with the reasoning recorded internally; or the claim is wrong, the review is left unchanged, and the operator is told so in writing. We don't enter pre-publication negotiation over scores.
Readers with concerns about Kinghills editorial conduct can escalate via the Contact page; complaints about specific reviews are answered within five business days. Privacy questions about data we hold fall under the Privacy Policy page, with the technical companion on the Cookie Policy page.