What’s actually ranking in iGaming in 2026, and what to stop investing in
For ten years we waited for the moment when content quality would finally decide an affiliate site's success. That moment isn't coming.
Google still doesn’t reward depth the way it should
What works is first-person writing, real experience on the page.
What’s frustrating is that Google still doesn’t reward depth the way it should. Plenty of affiliate sites get top positions, and even LLM citations, while offering shallow evaluations with nothing unique to say. There’s no magic formula for the content itself. The sites with the biggest Domain Rating still dominate.
The shape of the top ten has changed
Five years ago it was almost entirely major affiliates. Now it’s a mix: maybe five big affiliates, one or two Reddit, Trustpilot or store results, and one or two specialist sites.
Topical authority is real, and it’s specific
Ranking increasingly tracks a site’s perceived expertise in a specific area. A site that primarily covers online casinos but starts writing about prediction markets will rank worse for prediction markets than a betting-first site of equal strength, because prediction markets are closer to betting.
Freshness isn’t rewarded the way you’d expect
A recent example is Novig, which switched from a sweepstakes to a real-money model, yet the first three pages of results are still reviews covering the old model. Being current doesn’t save you if the authority sits with the outdated pages.
Why I’d take a lower CPA for an exclusive code
My practical advice, and this is something I’d push operators on directly: move to code-based deals. An LLM or a Google snippet is far more likely to surface your specific bonus code than a generic offer.
If I ran an affiliate site, I’d negotiate for a distinct offer tied to my code, even at the cost of a slightly lower CPA. I’d rather take $150 CPA with an exclusive angle, say a special $10 bonus that exists only through my code, than $200 for the same offer everyone else is running. Anything that makes your listing different increases the odds an answer engine cites you specifically. It isn’t technically possible everywhere, but where it is, it’s worth doing.
The broader point is that undifferentiated content is going to lose. If your offer, your data, or your angle is identical to a hundred other sites, the answer engines have no reason to pick you. Distinctiveness is becoming a visibility strategy, not just a branding one.
Regulation and competition are what make this hard
Not everyone can build a good iGaming site, because the legal picture shifts from market to market and vertical to vertical. What works in one place is prohibited in another, and you have to know those limits cold.
And the competition is brutal. People pile in because the margins are high, but they underestimate how hard it is to rank for the keywords that matter, and harder still to convert. So many operators, so many offers, and only a few succeed. It comes down to authority and credibility, and that’s built over years, sometimes decades. This is a long game, and the people who treat it like a quick win are usually the ones who disappear.
Milan Novakovic, HIREQUARTERS. His estimate from client data, not a measured average.
The type of client is shifting
We almost never hear from up-and-coming webmasters trying to break into the affiliate game anymore, because with this level of competition and the overall drop in clicks, those people barely exist now.
Instead, most of our clients are major affiliate groups trying to win on the margins: timestamps, in-depth comparisons, expert takes on specific parts of a product, first-hand experience. And increasingly, clients who want us to humanise AI content, generate it with their own prompts and methods, then do the final human pass.
Nobody scrolls to the bottom of page two
I’ll say something uncomfortable. For ten years we all waited for the moment when content quality would finally be the decisive factor for an affiliate site’s success. That moment isn’t coming.
Between shrinking attention spans and the flood of LLM content, the affiliates who win won’t be the ones with the best 5,000-word review. Nobody scrolls to the bottom of page two to read it. The winners will be the ones offering something you can’t replicate: a unique tool, a SaaS-hybrid model, an exclusive bonus, something genuinely differentiated.
For content itself, the rule becomes: front-load the most commercially valuable part, because any other model isn’t financially sustainable.
$200
Generic offer
Identical to a hundred other sites. No reason for an answer engine to cite you.
$150
Exclusive code
A bonus that exists only through you. Something specific for a model to surface.
Illustrative figures from the article.
Where this ends up
I expect most operators to build out an SEO arm of their own within a few years. And I think a lot of agencies and the content divisions of affiliate businesses will shut down, simply because content on its own won’t generate enough monetary value to justify its cost.
But creativity will always be rewarded. Promotion through podcasts, forums, and other channels will have to sit alongside the existing model rather than replace it.
The opportunity isn’t in producing more content. It’s in owning something, a tool, an audience, a distinct edge, that the machines can’t just regenerate.