The promo code tracking problem: why gambling operators are quietly cutting affiliates out

Ten years ago, a custom promo code was the affiliate’s whole business model in miniature. You built the content, you earned the ranking, the reader typed your code at sign-up, and the operator’s system logged exactly where that customer came from. It was crude, but it worked, and everyone understood the deal.

That deal is quietly ending.

What’s actually changed

I run British Gambler, an independent affiliate site working with UK-licensed operators. Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched something shift in how those operators treat promo codes. Custom, trackable codes — the kind that used to attribute a sign-up back to a specific affiliate — are being phased out in favour of one thing: pure click-through traffic via direct affiliate links.

I’ve seen this directly with bet365, which pulled tracking from its custom codes earlier this year. I’ve seen it across Rank Group brands. I’ve seen it at SBK. Three operators, three different corners of the market, moving the same direction. That’s not coincidence — it’s becoming the standard.

The stated logic, when operators offer one, is usually about quality: they want traffic that has actually engaged with your content, not a code copied from a forum and pasted into a sign-up box by someone with no relationship to your site at all. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But it isn’t only bonus hunters who get caught by this. It’s every reader who does exactly what good content is supposed to make them do — trusts the recommendation, remembers the code, and signs up. If they use the code without clicking your link first, you did the work and the operator keeps the customer.

Why this is worse than it sounds

Here’s where it stops being a minor tracking inconvenience and starts being an existential problem, and the reason is Google.

The data on this is not subtle. When an AI Overview appears on a search result, multiple independent studies through 2026 put the click-through rate decline at somewhere between 34% and 61%, depending on the query type and how the study was run. Seer Interactive’s tracking of organic CTR on AI-Overview-triggered queries found it fall from 1.76% to as low as 0.61% at the low point — a decline of roughly 65%. Pew Research, working from real browsing data rather than estimated keyword models, found users clicked through to a traditional result only 8% of the time when an AI Overview was present, against 15% without one. SparkToro puts the share of all Google searches that end without any click at close to 69%.

Those are industry-wide numbers, not gambling-specific ones. But apply them to a promo code page, and the mechanism becomes obvious. A reader searches “bet365 bonus code.” Google’s AI Overview reads the top-ranking pages, extracts the offer and the code, and displays both directly in the search results. The reader has everything they need — the code, the headline offer, maybe even a line of description — without opening a single page. They copy the code. They sign up directly on the operator’s site or app. The affiliate whose content Google just summarised gets nothing, because there was no click, no cookie, no attribution event of any kind.

None of that is a failure on your part. You built the page that outranked the competition. You wrote something specific enough that Google trusted it as the answer. That is the job, and you did it. What’s missing is the one signal the whole payment structure was built around: somebody actually landing on your site. Take that away, and it doesn’t matter how much of the work was yours — there’s no record that you were involved at all.

Now combine that with operators removing code tracking unless the user clicks through a direct affiliate link first. The two trends don’t just coincide — they compound each other. Even where a code is still trackable in principle, the AI Overview has usually already served it up in a form that removes the one behaviour — the click — that tracking depends on.

Why gambling, and not everywhere else

What makes this genuinely strange is that it isn’t happening across every affiliate-driven industry.

In travel, custom promo codes for hotel and taxi apps are still very much a thing, and they’re still trackable regardless of whether the user found them in an AI Overview or clicked through first. The same is true in VPN and eSIM affiliate marketing — sectors that are, if anything, more exposed to zero-click search behaviour than gambling, given how heavily their content lives in comparison and “best of” formats. If my promo code for a VPN service surfaces in an AI Overview, I still get the sign-up, because the code itself is doing the attribution — no click required.

Gambling operators had that option and are walking away from it. Which raises the obvious question: what’s the actual end game?

What I think is happening

My honest read is that this isn’t really about bonus hunters, even though that’s the framing operators tend to reach for. Bonus hunters are a real cost, but they’re a manageable one, and operators have had years to build better fraud detection without needing to gut the entire tracking model.

I think this is about operators wanting to own the top of their own funnel.

Look at what’s already happening. BetMGM runs its own in-house content operation — a casino blog publishing exactly the kind of guides and comparison content that used to be affiliate territory. LiveScore Bet and dazn bet are built on the same logic from the start: media-adjacent brands running their own editorial pages, promoting their own product, with no affiliate commission to pay out at all. If an operator can rank its own “best casino bonuses” page, or get cited directly in an AI Overview as the source, it captures the same zero-click reader an affiliate used to convert — and keeps 100% of the value instead of paying a CPA or revenue share on it.

Removing tracking from custom codes doesn’t stop that content from working. It just stops affiliates from getting paid when it does. Which, if you’re an operator building your own content arm, is precisely the outcome you want.

Where that leaves affiliates

I don’t think most affiliates have fully absorbed what this means yet, because the transition has been gradual enough that it reads as a series of individual operator decisions rather than an industry direction. But three or more major brands moving the same way in the same year is a direction, not a coincidence.

The uncomfortable question is whether affiliates have any real leverage here. In principle, nothing stops a group of independent affiliates from refusing to promote operators who strip tracking from their codes, and steering effort toward the ones who still play fair. In practice, the operators who are doing this tend to be the ones with the strongest brand recognition and the highest search demand already — precisely the ones an affiliate site can least afford to drop from its content.

What I don’t think is a serious answer is walking away from the licensed, regulated market over it. The instinct is understandable, but the parts of this industry outside UK licensing don’t get safer or fairer just because the tracking is worse here — they get considerably worse on every other measure that matters. That’s not a real alternative, it’s a different set of problems layered on top of this one.

What I do think independent affiliates need to do is stop assuming SEO alone is a durable position. Ranking well is still necessary, but it is no longer sufficient, because Google itself is now the thing extracting the value out of that ranking before the reader ever reaches your page. That means building things an AI Overview can’t extract and an operator’s in-house content team can’t easily replicate: genuine testing and comparison work, relationships and access that produce real reporting rather than rewritten terms and conditions, and — a foundation I don’t think we can afford to keep treating as a separate department — direct commercial relationships with operators that aren’t solely dependent on a code surviving contact with a search results page.

Ranking is still the entry ticket. It just isn’t the business any more.

Alexander explored an earlier, affiliate-focused version of this argument on British Gambler.