BetLink ranks operator deals so an affiliate can scan the catalogue and tell, in five seconds, whether a programme is worth signing up to. The score is a weighted composite of six axes that affiliates told us actually drive long-term EBITDA — not headline rev-share, not bonus size, not who shouted the loudest in last year’s SBC booth. This page documents the weights, the inputs, and the limits of the model so nobody confuses a 78 with a guarantee.
How we score operator deals
Every operator is rated 0–100 on each of the six axes below. The headline score is a fixed-weight average; the weights add to 100 and are reproduced as a bar chart so the relative importance is obvious. The weights were chosen by surveying 41 super-affiliates in March 2026 and stress-testing the result against twelve known programme failures from 2022–2025.
Rubric weights
Total: 100- Licensing & jurisdictional fit25
- Payment reliability & speed22
- Contract terms (NCC, deductions, kill-switch)18
- Game mix & player-conversion quality15
- Affiliate support responsiveness12
- Operator reputation & longevity8
Data sources
- Regulator publications across 104 authorities — Malta MGA, UK GC, Germany GGL, Curaçao CGB, Ontario AGCO, Brazil SPA, and the rest of the BetLink-tracked register.
- Public affiliate-program pages — the operator’s own marketing copy on rev-share, CPA, NCC, deduction stacks, and payout cycle.
- Operator T&Cs — manually verified by the BetLink trust team on intake and re-verified monthly. Diffs go into the operator’s audit log.
- Affiliate-submitted postback histories — anonymised, aggregated across the verified panel, and reconciled against the operator’s reported figures.
Refresh cadence
License records re-checked nightly against regulator feeds. Payment terms re-verified monthly by the operator-relations team. Reputation signals — payout delays, NCC enforcement, support response times — updated weekly from the verified-affiliate panel. Any material event (licence revocation, ownership transfer, banking incident) triggers an out-of-band re-score within 48 hours.
Edge cases and known gaps
Grey markets are scored on observed enforcement, not formal licence status — an operator can carry a Curaçao licence and still serve traffic the local regulator actively pursues. The score over-weights European and DACH-licensed operators because the verified affiliate panel is densest there; operators in Brazil, LatAm, and APAC carry an “evidence-light” marker until the panel deepens. A 92 in Europe can be a 41 for someone shipping LatAm traffic — always read the per-axis breakdown on the operator page before relying on the headline number.
Revision history
Methodology is iterating. Last revision: 2026-05-16. Weight changes are versioned and published in the BetLink changelog. Any score adjustment larger than 10 points triggers a written note on the operator page explaining the input that moved. Open questions are tracked publicly at github.com/betlink/methodology-issues (placeholder URL — public publication is counsel-pending).