How we verify sweepstakes casino facts
Affiliate review sites often copy each other. We don’t. Every fact about a casino (the states it accepts, its minimum redemption, minimum age, mail-in entry and operating company) comes from the operator’s own pages. Each fact is stored with the page URL, the date we read it, and a verbatim quote, and you can see all three in the Sources list at the bottom of every casino page.
The sources we use
- Sweepstakes rules and terms of use. Most facts come from here: redemption minimums, playthrough, mail-in entry, excluded states, minimum age and the company behind the site.
- Help center articles. Operators often answer the practical questions here, such as payment methods, processing times and which states they accept.
- The operator’s home page. Used for what the operator advertises, like the welcome offer and the size of its game library, and quoted exactly as shown.
- News reports. Only for events an operator won’t announce in its rules, such as a closure or a state lawsuit. These are labeled “third-party report” wherever they appear.
We read pages live wherever we can. When an operator page couldn’t be fetched directly, we used an archived copy instead, and that source is labeled “archived copy of” so you can tell it apart from a live read.
Quotes, and the script that checks them
A fact needs a quote, not a paraphrase. We save the text of every operator page we read, and a script compares each stored quote with that saved text. If a quote isn’t on the page, the check fails. It also fails any operator address we never actually fetched, which catches a link typed from memory. Facts from news reports aren’t matched this way, which is one more reason they carry their own label.
Dates and freshness
Every quote carries the date we read it, and each casino page shows the date of its newest operator source. Operators change their rules often. A casino whose newest operator source is more than 60 days old is labeled “may be outdated”.
To refresh a casino we fetch its source pages live again, never from an archive, and look for every stored quote. If they’re all still there, the date moves forward. If a quote has gone or the page won’t load, the old date stays and the fact is reviewed by hand. When a help article shows its own “last updated” date, we record that as well.
Where state availability comes from
We combine three things and treat a state as unavailable if any of them says so: the operator’s excluded-states list, states where the operator allows Gold Coin play only, and states that restrict sweepstakes casinos by law or regulator action. State law wins over the operator’s list. When a new law takes effect before an operator updates its list, we mark the state unavailable and say so on the casino’s page. A bill that is still pending doesn’t change availability, but the state page flags it.
State laws are checked against the enacted bill or the legislature’s record where we can reach it, and otherwise against trade press reporting. When our own research was wrong, we corrected it and the state page says so. Wyoming’s 2026 gambling law, for example, does not address sweepstakes, so we list Wyoming as having no specific law.
What “Not verified yet” means
It means we haven’t found that fact on the operator’s own pages, so we don’t show one. It doesn’t mean the answer is no. A casino might offer mail-in entry and just not explain it anywhere we could read. We don’t fill the gap from other review sites, even when they sound sure, and in the Editor Rating a missing fact is left unscored rather than counted as zero.
Which casinos get a full review page
A casino gets an indexable page only when we’ve verified its domain, a sourced state list less than 180 days old, and at least 60% of its core facts (weighted), with at least one operator source. 93 casinos meet that bar today; others appear in the directory with a “partial data” label and their pages are hidden from search engines until they do.
Corrections
Every casino page has a “Report a mistake” link, and anyone can use our corrections form. We don’t change a fact on a report alone. We go back to the operator’s current pages, and if the rule has changed, the fact gets a new quote and a new date. A link to the page that shows the change speeds this up.
Ratings
The verified facts feed the Editor Rating, while Ahrefs and Semrush data feed Market Signal. Both are explained on how we rate. Neither can be bought. Every casino is scored by the same published formulas, with no manual adjustments, and every link goes straight to the operator’s site.