Why we publish every penalty
A score whose reasoning is hidden asks to be believed. A score whose reasoning is published asks to be checked. Only the second one can be worth anything.
The number is not the point
Every operator in our register carries a TrustAudit Index. It starts at 10.0 on the day the operator is listed, and it falls from there — but the figure at the end is not what we are actually publishing. What we are publishing is the ledger: every deduction, its size, and the reason it was applied.
Open any operator page and you will find, in order: the licensing deduction and the regime it reflects. Each unfair clause catalogued in the terms, with its severity, and whether we recorded an enforcement. The withdrawal-limit deduction and the cap behind it. The complaint deduction, the black points, and the size band we divided by. Any blacklist evidence. Any pooling from a sister brand. The responsiveness bonus, if earned.
Add them up and you get the score. You can do the arithmetic yourself. We would prefer that you did.
The alternative, and what is wrong with it
The dominant model in this industry is a number without a reason. An operator gets 8.7 out of 10. Underneath sit a few category bars — Games, Support, Payments — each of which is itself an unexplained number. Somewhere there is a sentence about a "proprietary methodology" and an assurance that it is rigorous.
Ask the only question that matters about such a score: what would have to be true for it to be wrong?
There is no answer. You cannot check it. You cannot find the line you disagree with, because there are no lines. You cannot detect a thumb on the scale, because the scale is not visible. A score constructed this way is not falsifiable, and an unfalsifiable claim is not really a claim at all. It is an assertion of authority.
An unfalsifiable score is also very easy to move, and nobody has to be corrupt for it to happen. The 8.7 drifts to 8.9 because a partner asked, or because the deal is a good one, or simply because nobody in the building can articulate why it was 8.7 to begin with. The absence of a ledger does not merely hide misconduct. It removes the friction that would have prevented it.
Publishing the reason changes the incentive
Once every deduction is public, moving a score requires changing a fact — one with our name on it, on a public page, where the operator's lawyers, the operator's competitors and any reader with an afternoon can all read it.
That is a different economy. To improve its score, an operator must remove a clause from its terms, answer its cases, or raise its withdrawal cap. Those are precisely the things we want operators to do. The only route to a better number runs through becoming better in a way that is visible to the players we are writing for. That is not a side effect of the design; it is the design.
And when we are wrong, the error has an address. Somebody can write and say: this clause has been out of our terms since March, here is the archived page. We check, and if they are right we correct it, dated and visible. An error that can be pointed at is an error that gets fixed. An error inside a black box is just the number.
What it costs us
The open ledger is expensive, and it is worth being honest about the bill.
It is slow: cataloguing clauses is manual work, and verifying a licence against a regulator's register is manual work, done by a person we name. It makes us look harsh, because itemised deductions read as more critical than a bare 8.7 that means the same thing. It hands operators a precise map of what to argue with us about, and some of them do, at length.
And it means we cannot fill the register quickly. Where the evidence is not in, the page says Not yet rated — because a ledger with an invented line in it is not a ledger. That rule costs us traffic on every new listing, and we are keeping it.
The claim we are actually making
We are not asking you to trust our judgement. We are asking you to check our arithmetic.
That distinction is the whole product. A review site that asks for trust has to be believed. A review site that shows its working can be caught — and being catchable, over years, is the only way any of this earns the thing everybody else simply claims.
The full model is on the methodology page; the commercial arrangements that have no path into it are itemised on the transparency page. Find a line you think is wrong, and tell us. We publish corrections the same way we publish penalties.