UKGC data: 7.7 million illegal-gambling URLs sent to search engines in a quarter — and nothing to payment firms

On 5 November 2026 the Gambling Commission published its illegal gambling data dashboard for November, grouping its indicators into three areas: supply of illegal gambling, consumer demand, and the impact of its own disruption work. The underlying data tables are published alongside — and they contain the most practical numbers.

Supply and demand

• 586 illegal gambling websites accessible from Great Britain were identified in September 2026 — 4% below the previous three-month average, 4% above September 2025.
• 97 affiliate pages linking to illegal sites were found that month, 26% below the three-month average.
• For generic searches such as “best casinos”, 4% of Google results led to illegal sites. Casino-related terms ran higher, at around 5%.
• Estimated engagement with identified illegal sites was 12% above the previous three-month average, but 11% below a year earlier.
• 2.5% of people who had gambled online in the past four weeks are estimated to have used an illegal site in that period; at population level, the figure is 0.6%.

One search theme in the tables is moving the wrong way: estimated searches for ways around blocking software rose sharply from late 2025 into January 2026, even as searches for “not on GamStop” fell.

What the Commission actually does

The disruption table is the part worth reading closely. In Q2 2026/27 (July to September), the Commission:

• referred 7,677,211 URLs to search engines, covering 1,835 websites — up from 147,721 URLs the quarter before;
• issued 546 cease-and-desists to illegal operators (217 the quarter before) and 169 to advertisers and affiliates;
• made 373 referrals to registrars or hosts (103 before);
• referred 110 URLs to platforms;
• made 111 referrals to other agencies, regulators or law enforcement, and opened 4 criminal investigations;
• issued no cease-and-desists to payment service providers — as in five of the last six quarters.

In total, 311 websites were subject to disruption, 38% more than the previous quarter. For sites disrupted in the quarter before that, 77% saw estimated traffic fall over the following three months, and total estimated traffic across them fell by 18%.

The caveats the Commission gives

The regulator is candid about the limits. The site count reflects what its search-based monitoring finds and “is not a complete count of the illegal market”. Traffic figures are modelled Similarweb estimates, with an uplift applied for VPN use. And the post-disruption traffic drop “should not be interpreted as evidence that all changes were caused solely by the disruption”. The dashboard does not break out clone or impersonation sites as a separate category.

What this means for you

For licensed operators, the dashboard is an official baseline: numbers a brand can cite when asking a platform, registrar or host to act on an illegal site — the regulator itself treats these sites as a measurable harm and refers them through the same channels.

It is also a map of which levers work at scale. Search delisting, registrar and hosting referrals, and cease-and-desists to operators and affiliates are where the Commission’s volume goes. Those are the same levers available against a clone of your own site or an affiliate pushing it. The near-total absence of payment-provider action is notable; payment routes remain the least-used pressure point.

And the modest 18% traffic reduction is the honest part. One round of action rarely ends an illegal site; repeated action, across several channels, is what moves the number.