Editorial Guidelines
What follows is a written rulebook for how Paddy Power produces its reviews, guides and comparison content — codified deliberately so readers have something concrete to hold us against, rather than relying on whatever feels acceptable in any given week. Background on the people behind the publication is on the About page; the marquee piece of coverage itself is the Paddy Power Casino homepage. Any procedure described below — how reviews get built, how facts get verified, how mistakes get fixed, how content gets refreshed — is binding across every page produced for this site without exception.
1. Editorial neutrality
The revenue model behind Paddy Power turns on affiliate commissions: when a visitor follows a link to an operator and goes on to open an account, a commission is generated. Everything mechanical about that arrangement is laid out separately on the Affiliate Disclosure page. Boiled down to one editorial line, paying for a partnership earns no points and skipping one costs none. Every operator that gets a full write-up runs through the same scoring rubric, no exceptions. In practice, partner brands have ended up below six on the scale, while brands carrying no commercial tie have ended up at eight or higher. Commercial activity, marketing and editorial sit in different workflows entirely, and editorial holds the final call on every score that goes live.
2. Sources we rely on
Paddy Power content rests on four kinds of source, ranked by weight.
- Hands-on testing. Each review starts from a working account on the operator's platform, with genuine money moving in via deposits and back out via withdrawal requests. Everything in a write-up that is not a verifiable third-party fact comes from this primary observation.
- Regulatory and government records. Anything legal in nature — current operating licence, declared corporate owners, an operator's listing in the UKGC register, an entry in the GAMSTOP directory, statutory provisions in the Gambling Act 2005 — comes from primary government records, not summaries.
- Independent player-community evidence. Long-term reputation across AskGamblers, Casino Guru and Trustpilot, alongside Reddit and dedicated player forums. Used as a sanity check on testing results, not as a primary source in its own right.
- Operator-supplied material. Marketing pages, partnership briefings and press kits are reviewed purely as background colour and are never quoted in a way that suggests independent verification. Any time a figure traces back to the operator itself, the review flags that provenance openly.
3. Fact-checking process
Before going live, an operator write-up clears four discrete fact-check gates. Gate one is the licence claim, which is verified directly through the regulator's public register. Gate two is the bonus maths — we work the wagering arithmetic ourselves from the published terms and compare what falls out against whatever number appears on the marketing banner, and any gap between the two ends up called out in the body of the review. Gate three is the cashier sweep, where named payment methods, stated cashout windows and minimum deposit values are crossed against the live cashier interface rather than against the FAQ page (the two pages routinely contradict each other). Gate four is the catalogue check, where lobby content is sampled by specific studio and specific title to confirm the marketing matches what is actually live in the lobby.
Volatile figures — wagering multipliers attached to bonuses, daily or weekly cashout ceilings, minimum top-up amounts — get flagged inside our editorial tracker and re-verified on a fixed cadence laid out further down this document. When a recheck surfaces a moved number, three things happen in order: the relevant claim inside the review is corrected, the page-header date is bumped, and a timestamped change-log entry appears at the bottom of the review describing the delta.
4. Quotation, paraphrase and proper credit
Verbatim quotation is held back for cases where the wording itself carries weight — text from a regulator, the wording of an operator's terms and conditions, language pulled from a court ruling. Outside those narrow situations, the default approach is to paraphrase with the source named in the same sentence. Operator marketing language is always rewritten into our own voice, and operator press releases never get reused wholesale as Paddy Power content. Any third-party data point — a star rating on Trustpilot, the volume of open complaints on AskGamblers — comes with the source named and a working link attached.
Statistical assertions touching on gambling harm, the volume of regulatory enforcement activity or the overall scale of the UK online casino industry are traced to government bodies, academic researchers or peer-reviewed publication outlets. Numbers coming out of trade-body publications get cited only where an independent secondary source corroborates them.
5. Bylines and AI involvement
Authorship of every Paddy Power piece sits with a named human — a writer or somebody on the editorial team. Machine assistance is permitted in a deliberately tight band: outline drafting, condensing long source material, polishing grammar, suggesting alternative headlines. Where AI is off-limits is the analytical heart of a review — the numeric score, the strengths-versus-weaknesses framing, the comparative verdict between operators — and equally for producing quotations or testing observations that did not actually occur. Anything factual that surfaces through a model is verified against an independent source before it is allowed into a published page, and the citation always names the underlying source rather than the model that surfaced it.
6. Errors and revisions
Corrections are managed in three tiers, depending on the seriousness of the error.
- Minor (typo, broken link, formatting glitch): fixed silently inside one working day.
- Substantive (where a fact, number or claim materially shapes a reader's decision): fixed within a five-working-day window, accompanied by a timestamped note at the page footer setting out what was altered and the reasoning. The pre-correction wording stays in our internal version history but is never republished publicly.
- Material (an error severe enough to change the overall verdict, or a regulatory development that affects multiple operators): fixed inside two working days, with a prominent banner at the top of the page for at least 30 days, and a notice on a dedicated corrections log accessible from this page.
Anyone reading a Paddy Power page who spots what looks like a factual error can flag it via the Contact page. Substantive complaints are recorded against the review concerned regardless of whether the final outcome is a correction or no change.
7. Content freshness
A complete top-to-bottom revisit of every operator write-up happens on at minimum a twelve-month rhythm, with the volatile figures inside (welcome offers, payout windows, payment-method support) re-checked at three-month intervals. Topic guides and the methodological pages are revisited on an annual cycle. The "Last updated" stamp on each page tracks the most recent substantive editorial review of the content, not minor cosmetic tidying.
8. Conflicts of interest and bias
Members of the Paddy Power editorial team are barred from holding equity, accepting consulting payments or maintaining paid affiliate ties with any operator they personally cover in a review. Where the risk of a conflict appears, the piece is moved to a different writer and the reallocation is captured in internal records. The affiliate partnerships disclosed at the site level on the Affiliate Disclosure page exist as operational commercial relationships handled by a separate function, with no overlap into the personal interests of individual editorial staff.
9. Reader wellbeing
The subject matter on Paddy Power is, by its nature, an adult product, and three concrete editorial commitments fall out of that fact. First commitment: nowhere on the site is gambling framed as a path to income — every page treats it as a paid leisure activity carrying loss risk, full stop. Second commitment: every operator review and every comparative roundup carries visible (not footnoted) links to Responsible Gambling tooling and the UK helplines that matter. Third commitment: no Paddy Power page aims its wording, visuals or examples at minors, at people experiencing gambling harm, or at users who have self-excluded. Where an operator's own marketing breaches any of those three lines, the review calls it out and the score takes the hit.
10. Grievances, escalations and right of response
An operator that takes issue with the way Paddy Power has rated it can write to the editorial inbox supplying a specific factual claim plus the supporting evidence behind it. Three things can then happen. If the operator's claim turns out to be right, the review is amended and a correction note is published alongside it. If the claim is right in part, only that verified portion of the review is amended, while the remainder is held in place with the reasoning logged in our internal records. If the claim turns out to be wrong, the review stays exactly as published and the operator receives a written response explaining why. Pre-publication score negotiation, on the other hand, is something we do not participate in under any circumstances.
Any reader with a concern over how Paddy Power has handled an editorial matter can escalate it through the Contact page, and complaints relating to specific reviews receive a reply within a five-working-day window. Questions about how reader data is gathered or held fall under the Privacy Policy page, while the technical breakdown of cookies and similar storage lives on the Cookie Policy page.