The battle for online gambling players is no longer being fought on sportsbooks and casino sites — it’s being fought on search engines. iGaming.com CEO Prof. Dr. Andreas Ditsche breaks down for SBC News the growing challenges facing licensed affiliates as black-market operators gain ground online, and outlines why the industry’s long-established affiliate model may be approaching a critical turning point.

The legal online-gambling market is losing the search results page. That fact now matters more in European affiliate marketing than any single product release or licence award this cycle, and the tactical responses available (better content, faster pages, sharper bids) have run out of room to fix it. Anyone running performance KPIs across regulated affiliates already sees the slope: a year of compliance work, marginal ranking gains, and a black-market share that keeps growing.

The next 24 months will force a clean break from the affiliate model that built the European market. Licensed publishers will either move from volume to authority, or they will be priced out of the funnels they helped create.

The mechanics of the disadvantage

The methods used to push unlicensed sites to the top of search results are no longer a mystery, and most senior teams reading this can probably name two or three off the top of their head. The “canonical trick”, in which operators buy expired high-authority domains, redirect them at fresh casino properties and cycle rapidly when penalties hit, is standard practice in the grey market. Parasite SEO, where unlicensed brands publish thin gambling content on high-authority non-gambling sites to ride the host’s trust, is now industrial. Mimicry of legitimate brands, including cloned logos and stolen review content, is increasingly used against legal publishers themselves.

Compliant affiliates routinely face DDoS attacks against their infrastructure, fake DMCA takedown requests, and legal letters whose only realistic purpose is to damage the credibility and visibility of competing legitimate content. Much of this is coordinated, well-funded, and aimed at the publishers most likely to convert players away from illegal sites.

This is not an aggressive marketing problem. It is a structural one. Legal affiliates cannot match the velocity or the asymmetric tactics of the black market, and bringing better SEO to that fight is bringing a knife to a contest where the rules don’t apply.

Germany is the canary

Germany is the easiest place to see where the channelisation gap is heading. According to the country’s Joint Gambling Authority (GGL), unlicensed operators continue to absorb a meaningful share of online gambling spend despite three years of post-Glücksspielstaatsvertrag enforcement. The structural reason is visible in the SERPs: queries from players actively seeking what the legal market cannot offer, such as “casino ohne limit” or “casino ohne OASIS”, return zero licensed results in the top 10.

That audience is not the casual player who can be retained with better welcome bonuses. It is a high-value base actively rejecting the legal product on its compliance design. The deposit limits. The central self-exclusion file (OASIS). The identity verification. Licensed operators cannot legally serve those players, and responsible affiliates cannot honestly promote what those searches are asking for. The traffic gap is therefore not a marketing problem to be optimised away. It is a regulatory by-product, and the legal market is now competing only for the players who did not type those queries.

The three shifts

The change involves three structural shifts now reshaping the legal affiliate model: from growth to compliance, from scale to fragmentation, and from conversion to responsibility. The diagnosis is not new. Most senior affiliate teams have been quietly making one or more of those moves since 2023. Stating all three together is useful, because it kills the idea that any single one is sufficient.

Five years ago, we optimised for clicks. Today, we optimise for trust.

Read straight, compliance stops being a constraint on growth and becomes the defensible moat. Responsible-gambling content, transparent affiliate disclosures, identity-protection guidance and visible co-operation with regulators are the only assets that black-market competitors structurally cannot copy. Fragmentation, operating dozens of country-specific properties at editorial standard rather than ten global ones, is the price of being credible to a national regulator. Responsibility as a KPI means measuring affiliate value by player retention and harm avoidance, not by first-deposit volume.

What this means for operator partners

The practical implication for sportsbook and casino operators is uncomfortable, and worth saying plainly. Affiliate spend that is still benchmarked on cost-per-acquisition velocity is benchmarked against the wrong market. The relevant comparison is no longer the cheapest legal affiliate against the most expensive one, but the entire legal affiliate stack against an illegal ecosystem with no compliance overhead.

Operators that adapt will start treating affiliate compliance content (responsible-gambling resources, regulator-friendly editorial, transparent partner disclosures) as performance assets, budgeted and measured accordingly. Operators that don’t will find their funnels fed by publishers who are themselves losing ground in the search results, and whose ranking trajectory will not be fixed by another quarter of link-building.

Policy is finally catching up

Two developments will determine how quickly the asymmetry can close. The first is platform liability. A run of recent rulings in the United States, including the Third Circuit’s decision in Anderson v. TikTok, has begun chipping away at the long-standing principle that platforms are immune from the design consequences of their own algorithms. The second is European: the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) has confirmed it expects a horizontal EU legislative package addressing the conduct of large online platforms later this year, sitting alongside the Digital Services Act framework and new rules covering gambling advertising, minors and influencer marketing.

Neither will close the channelisation gap on its own. Together they could give national regulators tools that match the cross-border, platform-mediated nature of the problem they are trying to police. The condition is that the legal product remains attractive enough to compete for the players the law is trying to protect. That is the part the regulator cannot do for the industry.

The operators and affiliates who survive the next two years will be those whose stack reads as editorially credible to a regulator, a player and a search engine at the same time. There is no shortcut left that does not eventually run into one of those audiences. The clicks era is over. What replaces it is slower work, and for the legal market, the kind of work that finally compounds.