What has to be true before something is published here

What counts as evidence

An operator claim is publishable when it comes from a page the operator itself controls: its footer, its terms, its licence page, its promotions page, or its own structured data. Each one is recorded with the publisher, the URL, the date it was last opened, and the specific claim it supports. Those records are rendered at the bottom of every operator page, so any reader can repeat the check.

A regulator page counts as evidence for what the regulator says. A third-party article does not count as evidence for anything, however confident it sounds. Neither does an affiliate dashboard, a marketing email, or a figure that appears in search results without a source.

Why offer amounts are often missing

Of the 19 operators covered, 11 publish a sign-up offer that was read from their own page. The other pages carry no figure.

That is not laziness, it is the point. Bonus amounts are the most volatile thing an operator publishes and the most copied piece of misinformation in South African betting search. A figure gets captured once, then quoted by a dozen sites that never re-read it, and it outlives the offer by years. The most searched TopBet term in the country refers to an "R30 sign up bonus" that no first-party page in our evidence confirms.

Publishing a blank is a true statement about what we hold. Publishing a plausible number would be a false statement about an operator.

The evidence score, and how to recompute it

Each operator carries a score out of 10. It is called an evidence score rather than a rating because that is what it measures: how well an operator documents itself, and how directly our link reaches its signup. It says nothing about whether the product is good, whether the odds are competitive, or how fast withdrawals are, because we have not tested any of those and will not pretend to have.

Five inputs, two points each. Every input is a fact printed on the page it scores.

1. Legal identity. 2 if both the legal entity and a licence number are published by the operator; 1 if only one of them is; 0 if neither was captured.
2. Regulatory cover. 2 for three or more provincial regulators named; 1 for one or two; 0 for none.
3. Offer documented. 2 if the operator publishes a sign-up offer and its wagering requirement; 1 if it publishes the offer without the requirement; 0 if no offer was found on its own pages.
4. Product range. 2 for four or more product types in one account; 1 for one to three; 0 if none were captured.
5. Route directness. 2 if our link lands on the registration form or the welcome-offer page; 1 if it lands on a homepage or general sportsbook; 0 if no commercial route exists.

Every operator page prints its own five inputs and what each one scored, so the number is checkable rather than asserted. Nothing in the score is weighted by commission, and no input is a judgement.

The scores currently range from 3.0 to 8.0. That spread is the point: a score where everyone gets 9.2 is decoration.

How operators are ordered

By measured South African search demand for opening an account with that operator, taken from a keyword capture on 2026-08-05. Not by commission, and not by a quality score.

The order therefore does things a commercially-driven order would not. Operators with no commercial relationship rank above operators that pay, where the demand supports it. Two operators that do carry commercial links have no measured brand demand at all and sit at the bottom of the list because of it.

What blocks a commercial link

17 of 19 operators have full licence evidence captured, and 15 carry a commercial link. An operator whose licence we cannot read gets no commercial link and its page is excluded from search, even where a working tracked route exists. Routing a reader to a gambling product whose licence has not been read is the one thing this method does not allow.

Links to evidence, meaning regulators, operator terms, licence documents and support services, are never commercial and never tracked. Monetising a citation would make the citation worthless.

What we do not claim

• We do not claim to have tested payout speeds, withdrawal times or customer service. No timing is published for any operator, because none has been captured from a first-party source.
• We do not claim that a bookmaker licence approves every product on an operator's site. Casino-style products are licensed separately from sportsbooks, and each product needs its own scope evidence.
• We do not publish rankings, ratings or star scores, and no rating markup is emitted in the page structured data, because there is no rating behind it.
• We do not describe operator-reported figures as verified. What an affiliate platform reports about signups, deposits or revenue is an operator claim, not an independent measurement.

When pages change

Licence and terms pages are re-opened before a material update, before any offer amount is published or changed, and when an operator changes product categories or payment routes. A visible date changes only when the underlying content changed; the date is not refreshed to look current.