Editorial Policy
The editorial standards that govern every Heart Bingo review, guide and comparison page are written down here. The point is to give readers a documented rule to hold us to, rather than something that feels reasonable in the moment. Background on who runs the site is the topic of the About page, while the flagship operator review remains the Heart Bingo Casino homepage. Where this document specifies a procedure — review production, fact-checking, corrections, freshness — that procedure governs every piece of content released on the site.
1. Editorial independence
Heart Bingo is funded via affiliate commissions earned when readers click through to an operator and decide to register there. The full mechanics sit on the Affiliate Disclosure page. Editorially, the rule is brief: a partnership does not buy a higher rating, and the absence of one does not push a score down. A consistent rating framework is applied uniformly to every operator put through a full Heart Bingo review. Partner operators have come in at six and below, and operators with no commercial tie have come in at eight and above. Sales, marketing and editorial run as separate workflows; the editorial team holds the final call on every published score.
2. Sources we trust
Heart Bingo content is assembled from four categories of source, ranked by their weight in the final piece.
- Hands-on testing. Each review is built from a live account on the operator's platform, with real money on the line for both deposit and withdrawal flows. That account is the primary source feeding every claim in the piece, save for facts that can be independently verified elsewhere.
- Regulator and government records. Licensing status, ownership filings, UKGC register entries, GAMSTOP records and Gambling Act 2005 references. These act as the authoritative source for any legal claim that surfaces on Heart Bingo.
- Independent player-community evidence. Long-term reputational signals from AskGamblers, Casino Guru, Trustpilot, alongside Reddit and the dedicated player forums. Treated as a sanity check on the testing results rather than as a primary source on its own merits.
- Operator-supplied content. Press releases, marketing pages, partnership briefings. The team reads these for context, but never reproduces them as if they were independently verified. Wherever a figure originates from the operator itself, the review is explicit about that origin.
3. Fact-checking
Before publication, each operator review clears a four-stage fact-check. Stage one: the licensing claim is cross-referenced with the regulator's public register. Stage two: bonus arithmetic is rebuilt from the operator's own published terms and matched against the headline marketing figure; any gap between the two is recorded in the review. Stage three: payment methods, withdrawal speeds and minimum deposits are checked against the live cashier itself rather than the FAQ (the two often disagree). Stage four: catalogue claims are sampled against specific studios and specific titles to verify that the marketing reflects the actual lobby.
Numerical claims that shift frequently — bonus terms, withdrawal limits, minimum deposits — are tagged inside our internal tracking and re-checked on the schedule below. Where a re-check shows the number has moved, the review is updated, the date at the top of the page is bumped, and a small dated note is appended at the foot of the review noting what changed.
4. Quotation, paraphrase and attribution
Direct quotation is reserved for cases where the exact wording matters: regulator notices, official terms and conditions, court documents. Everywhere else, paraphrase is the default, with the source identified inline. Operator marketing copy is recast in our own voice; press releases never appear on Heart Bingo as Heart Bingo content. When a third-party figure is cited — a Trustpilot rating, an AskGamblers complaint count — the source is named explicitly and a working link is provided.
For statistical claims touching gambling harm, regulatory enforcement action, or the scale of the UK online casino market, the source must be government, academic or peer-reviewed material. Numbers from industry associations are only deployed where an independent corroborating source backs them up.
5. Authorship and AI assistance
A named human writer or editorial-team member is responsible for every Heart Bingo article. AI tooling can play a narrow supporting role: outline drafts, summarisation of long source documents, grammar passes, alternative headline ideas. What AI tools cannot do is generate the analytical content of a review — the score, the strengths-and-weaknesses summary, the comparative judgement — nor invent quotes or testing results. Any factual statement that first surfaced inside an AI tool is independently verified before it goes live, and the citation in the published piece points to the independent source, not the AI tool.
6. Corrections and updates
Corrections are handled across three tiers, depending on the severity of the error.
- Minor (typo, broken link, or formatting glitch): corrected silently within one business day.
- Substantive (a fact, figure or claim that meaningfully shapes a reader's decision): corrected inside five business days, accompanied by a dated note at the foot of the page setting out what changed and the reason. The original wording is retained in internal version history but does not reappear publicly.
- Material (an error grave enough to flip the overall verdict, or a regulatory shift touching multiple operators): corrected inside two business days, flagged with a prominent banner pinned to the top of the page for at least 30 days, and logged on a dedicated corrections register reachable from this page.
Where a reader believes a Heart Bingo page contains an error, the route to flag it runs through the Contact page. Substantive complaints are recorded against the relevant review in either case — whether or not a correction ends up being made.
7. Freshness
The full text of an operator review is revisited at intervals of no more than 12 months, while key data points (bonuses, withdrawal speeds, payment methods) are re-verified each quarter. Topic guides and methodological pages get an annual look. The "Last updated" stamp at the top of any page marks the most recent factual review specifically, not simply the latest typo-level fix.
8. Conflict of interest
Heart Bingo editorial team members do not hold equity in, accept consulting fees from, or carry paid affiliate relationships with operators they personally review. Where a possible conflict surfaces, the writer is reassigned to a different operator and the move is logged in our internal tracking. The site-level partnerships listed on the Affiliate Disclosure page are operational, not personal, and run on a separate workflow from editorial.
9. Reader safety
Adult products are the subject of every Heart Bingo review, which carries three editorial consequences. The first: no Heart Bingo page frames gambling as a path to income; the consistent positioning is "paid entertainment with downside risk". The second: every operator review and every comparative roundup carries through-links to Responsible Gambling tools and the relevant UK helplines as visible content, not buried in a footnote. The third: no Heart Bingo page directs language, imagery or examples at minors, problem gamblers, or self-excluded players. Where an operator's marketing strays across any of those lines, the review names it and the score reflects it.
10. Complaints, escalation and right of reply
Operators that take issue with a Heart Bingo rating may reach the editorial team with a specific factual claim and supporting evidence. Three outcomes are possible: the claim is correct, in which case the review is updated and a correction note appended. The claim is partially correct, in which case the review is updated for the verified portion and the remainder left unchanged with reasoning recorded internally. The claim is incorrect, in which case the review is unchanged and the operator informed in writing. We do not enter pre-publication negotiations over scores.
Readers with concerns about Heart Bingo editorial conduct can escalate via the Contact page; complaints about specific reviews receive a response within five business days. Privacy-related questions about the data we hold sit under the Privacy Policy page, with the technical companion on the Cookie Policy page.