Why RTPTrack Doesn't Cover 'Not on GamStop' Sites

Every month, tens of thousands of UK-based searches include the phrase "not on GamStop". Most of them come from players who have voluntarily excluded themselves from UK-licensed gambling and who are now looking for a way around their own decision. RTPTrack has seen the traffic opportunity, measured it, and decided not to touch it. This piece explains why, and what that decision says about what RTPTrack exists for in the first place.

What "not on GamStop" actually means

GamStop is the UK's national self-exclusion scheme. A UK resident who registers with GamStop blocks themselves from every UKGC-licensed online gambling site for a chosen period — six months, twelve months, or five years. The scheme is free, voluntary, and legally integrated into the conditions UKGC-licensed operators must honour. A player who is on GamStop cannot open a new account at any UK-licensed casino, bookmaker, bingo site, or lottery operator for the duration of their exclusion.

"Not on GamStop" is a search cluster aimed at finding casinos that are outside this system. In practice, this almost always means casinos licensed in offshore jurisdictions — Curaçao most commonly, sometimes Anjouan or Costa Rica. These operators cannot legally market to UK residents, but they often accept UK registrations regardless. They sit outside UKGC consumer protections, outside dispute-resolution schemes like IBAS, and outside the tax and compliance regime that shapes how UK-licensed casinos set RTP.

Why the traffic is so large

Three things drive the volume. The first is the simplest: GamStop is working. Hundreds of thousands of UK players are registered, and a meaningful subset of them experience urges to gamble before their exclusion period ends. The search is often a symptom of relapse intent, not casual curiosity.

The second is the RGD tax increase. Remote Gaming Duty rose from 21 per cent to 40 per cent in April 2026. Offshore operators, who pay no UK tax, can afford to run promotional RTP and bonus structures that no UK-licensed casino can match. Players who have noticed reduced RTP at their usual UK operator sometimes search for alternatives, and "not on GamStop" is one of the phrasings that surfaces offshore sites.

The third is affiliate economics. Offshore casinos pay much higher commissions than UK-licensed operators, often combined with aggressive promotional terms. This has created a substantial affiliate industry whose primary marketing channel is search, and whose primary search target is this keyword cluster. The cluster is commercially irresistible to any affiliate willing to chase it.

What covering it would require

If RTPTrack chose to enter this space, we would need to do at least some of the following. We would have to publish lists of casinos that are deliberately structured to accept UK players in defiance of the ASA's rules on gambling advertising to UK audiences. We would have to write positive editorial about operators whose dispute resolution is handled by whichever small Curaçao master licensee they happen to fall under, with none of the structural protections a UKGC licence carries. Our responsible gambling commitments would be immediately compromised. Our readers — many of whom arrive from informational searches about RTP and tier structures — would mix with readers actively trying to circumvent their own self-exclusion.

There is a softer version of this: sites that cover "not on GamStop" casinos with heavy caveats, responsible gambling links, and harm-reduction framing. I do not want to be unkind to colleagues in the industry who have taken this route in good faith. The issue is that the search intent is, in a large number of cases, not a question we can answer helpfully. A player who is actively looking for the exact set of casinos that bypass the self-exclusion they chose is unlikely to be in a place where an article caveat will change their behaviour. The most honest position is not to be on the page they arrive at.

The commercial cost

We estimate the traffic we are passing up is worth somewhere between 15 and 30 per cent of the total UK iGaming affiliate search market. In absolute terms that is enormous. Any new affiliate that launches in 2026 and covers this space thoroughly can reach meaningful traffic within six months. A site like RTPTrack, operating at a smaller scale, probably loses two-thirds of its ceiling by refusing this vertical.

I want to be clear that this is a cost we have chosen knowingly. It is not an oversight, not a gap we intend to fill later, and not a position we expect to reverse. The team has discussed it at length. Molty, who built the site, has the final word on commercial strategy, and his position is consistent: we are not going to publish this content. The site serves UK-licensed play, or it does not serve anyone.

What we do cover instead

We cover the UK-licensed market, in depth, with honest deployment data. That means what the UKGC actually requires of licensed operators, what those operators actually ship on popular slots, which sister casinos are platform skins of the same parent, which providers are fixed-RTP and which are not, and how to read the paytable screen inside a game to verify what a given casino is deploying.

We cover the regulatory picture in nearby markets too, for readers who want context: the Irish licensing framework, the Dutch and Maltese regimes, the Canadian provincial picture. These pieces describe how other jurisdictions have approached player protection. None of them recommend bypassing UKGC protection.

What we would ask readers to consider

If you are reading this and you are actively searching for a casino to play at while self-excluded: the gap between the urge and the act is often the only space where help reaches. GamCare run a twenty-four-hour helpline on 0808 8020 133. BeGambleAware is available at begambleaware.org. These services are confidential, they are free, and they are staffed by people who will not lecture you. If you have blocked yourself from UK sites and the urge to play has returned, that is exactly the moment these services exist for.

If you are reading this as an industry peer who disagrees with our position: I respect that. I would rather the industry had this debate openly than pretend the traffic does not exist. Our position is not that you are wrong to take the softer route. Our position is that we have drawn the line here, and we have reasons we are willing to state in public.

Where this leaves RTPTrack

Our mission is to make the deployed RTP of UK-licensed casinos visible to the players who use them. That mission does not require us to reach every possible reader. It requires us to reach the right ones. The readers we want are the ones who chose a UK-licensed site, want to know what version of the slot they are actually playing, and will make better decisions if they have that information. Those readers exist in large numbers, and they are not searching for "not on GamStop". They are searching for "is Book of Dead 96.21% at Bet365", and we have an answer for them.

That is the site we are building. It is a smaller site than it could be. We are fine with that.