Survival mode: iGaming affiliates and the Google crisis

I’ve been asked to write a post March 2026 Core Update roundup, but honestly I can’t. I can’t see a single positive that has come out of this much anticipated core update. 

What's even more infuriating is, it came after a pretty underwhelming spam update. As an industry, we’ve been pointing the finger firmly at Google for nearly 18 months now to clean up our SERPs. It appears to have its head firmly up its own AI production black hole, chasing down OpenAI, parking organic search updates and attempting to claw back market share from the ChatGPT launch.

But let's not dwell on Google AI too much, we’re here to talk about iGaming affiliate SEO and Google core updates. For affiliates, the outcome from the last two updates was pretty flat. I hear murmurs from luminary SEOs that Google targeted more scaled content abuse, self referencing listicle content and so on. But these tweaks are designed to deindex sites from organic search to stop them appearing in AI chat responses, not to improve organic results. So again, we’re back talking about AI. The irony here is that Google wants to clean up its search index so AI outputs aren’t manipulated, because chat tools like Gemini need Google search to ground answers in real-world information.  

From order to chaos

As a webmaster, if you once relied on safe SEO for traffic, I feel you might agree with me that the iGaming affiliate niche is in crisis. Right now, I am struggling to compile a top 20 ranking of iGaming affiliate websites. I’m currently head down looking at data for UK affiliate slots, casino, bingo and sportsbook search visibility. There used to be a top 20 in each of the four iGaming verticals with an established order.

Now I can barely name 20 websites across all four. I can see 20 affiliate sites in the top 100 results on Google. But to give any one of those sites the accolade of being a top affiliate in those searches right this minute, then I’m struggling. 

What's the cause? Many things. Unprecedented levels of spam links have caught Google off guard and are falsely affecting sites. Thousands of spam sites have been let in through the back door, advertising the worst-of-the-worst black market brands. And Google doesn’t really rely on low-level query matching anymore, so if you were a small to medium content-reliant SEO affiliate site, you’ll have been pushed out.

The organic affiliate channel, once the backbone of regulated lead generation and, in some cases, the only channel, is now falling apart before our eyes. The knock-on effect is causing operators to panic. Instead of supporting sites that helped them grow, they’re talking about consolidating partner programmes and shutting accounts. So yes, this is a crisis in my opinion. 

Losing faith in algorithm updates 

This is not another ‘SEO is dead’ article. Just my account of what's playing out in front of us right now. SEO certainly is not dead. SEO is currently the driving force behind a thriving spam industry promoting illegal operators, as has been documented many times over. It's thriving so much that I’m seeing SEO agencies on podcasts openly describing their reliance on old-hat SEO practices to dominate the SERPs. 

Now, with all that said, I’m sure Google hasn’t intentionally rolled out two ghost algorithm updates. My guess is that these were not the usual index reshuffles that we’re used to, but probably broader updates to the assessment attributes within the algorithms, like a vast code commit. I believe we’ll see the outcome of the March Core update develop more over time.

But a quick reality check here, don’t expect favours from the updates anymore. I’m of the opinion that Google is doing more to suppress some sites rather than attempting to discover more relevant results in our space. Algorithms like BERT, designed to understand the semantic similarities of content, actually make you feel like the SERP is becoming a "club" of the same 5-10 websites. So when you search variations of keywords from short queries to longtail intent, you don’t get those precise search results anymore. You get a bland list of the same players mixed in with random irrelevant high authority sites with loose connections to the query.

I, for one, was a fan of unique search focused pages that served longtail intent. They were rebuked and labelled doorway pages, therefore, a type of spam. Google really doesn’t want to service those searches anymore. Instead, you get the same brands ranking for 20 variations of a query, meaning they can cut off a vast amount of smaller creator-owned websites that relied on those longtail angles to rank. 

It's not innovation, it’s suffocation: fewer sites in the long term means users are unknowingly seeded smaller sets of results, which will be supplemented with AI answers and, of course, ads. This means Google doesn’t need to refactor trillions of queries for billions of websites per update. 

So that's why I think we see less movement with algorithm updates – they don’t affect masses of queries anymore. Google is no longer a search query engine; they’re a semantic answer engine using LLM-like models to list sites when you search, and they all seem very “samey”.

When EEAT meets hallucinated SERPs 

I’m in the UK and just searched “new casino sites”. Like most people, I expect to see many affiliates listing their own casino partner brands in the top 20-30 results. Google has other ideas, though. Among the illegal junk I see are Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators buying old-school money-phrase backlinks, using clean brand traffic to mask these easy tricks – it works. Then I see sites like Buzz Casino and Unibet (not new casinos), followed by Hardrock Casino Tejon (not new and not relevant to me in the UK) and the final nail in the coffin: the Gambling Commission (definitely not a casino, definitely not new).

This is semantic similarity hallucinating its head off. These results have nothing to do with the on-page content. I don’t know if Google has just given up on organic, or they turned AI on behind the scenes and we’re waiting for it to gather more data for better results, but this stuff is utter junk. Now, if you’re one of the affiliates who stuck to Google’s ethical playbook over the years, you just got crapped on big time. They don’t know how to decipher fake signals from content-relevant pages anymore. They’ve built algorithms that pull the same useless sites for thousands of queries, meaning you don’t get a look in, even if you have the best page for that query.

And what's the solution to combat this? EEAT… so we’re told.

It’s a sign that Google wants you to create more unique, original content while proving your authors and creators are just as distinct, all so it has fresh material to feed its greedy AI models. It seems that what's right for the searcher doesn’t fit into the LLM’s scraping model anymore. They need fresh meat to feast on. 

So we’re back ranking recipes with the chef’s back stories before you can get to the actual ingredients. Google wants our unique perspective on the content we create, which is all well and good, but when the searcher just wants a list of 20 new casinos to pump some free spins from, they’re going to be put off by all our useless EEAT. 

The myth of “more” in iGaming SEO 

So what for the future? More is not the answer right now. For me, more has sometimes been an SEO’s way of validating their place within an iGaming organisation. We need more pages, more paragraphs, more FAQs, more internal linking, more backlinks.

I don’t think I’ve ever sat down with a client who asked for stability or was impressed with a net neutral ROI plan. But here we are in an entire industry scrambling for visibility, fire fighting a spam storm with the same old do-more growth tactics. I believe that's the wrong approach. 

Spam algorithms run more dynamically nowadays, so affiliates who dip their toes into the old-hat scaled growth strategies without the cushion of an underlying brand profile will feel it most. I’m not saying don’t grow, just don’t scale recklessly for now – consolidate! 

There are signs of this happening already, with a number of scaled affiliate sites disappearing. I know what my top 20 should look like and who should be in there, but some of them have vanished from the SERPs in the last few months.

Stability for me is about the tactical side of strategy. Sustainable SEO as a phrase is sneaking into conversations and forum threads. The sentiment is correct. We all need sustainable SEO, but for me, it’s a bandaid for bad strategies.

But what does that mean? Well, if we go back to 2016, I can pretty much relay what we were talking about after Penguin 4.0 wiped out a huge chunk of the industry. A quick memory refresh: “Build your brand, nurture a customer base, pivot your products and pages to be customer-serving, not commercially weighted, give your link strategy a sanity check, answer real-world questions, don’t chase big-money keywords, focus on topics, work on converting your true traffic.”  

We’ve drifted so far away from those principles again because Google opened the door for spam and riskier tactics, and everyone piled on. Unfortunately, good projects that got caught up in the “do what works” hype or were misled by SEOs and agencies are being affected as well.

The SERPs that we see right now are a product of the perfect storm. It's an absolute mess. But if you believe it can improve, you have to sit tight, dig in and think about net neutral ROI from your SEO – because I know for many it's all negative right now.

Keep the channel clean and talk about how you intend to use SEO to build stable traffic funnels that convert. If you’re still pushing for more content, why was it not there already? If you think you need more links, what on-page SEO hasn’t worked for you? And if you’re chasing new traffic, have you got the best conversion rates on the pages that already rank?

That's sustainable SEO. Let's not be afraid to challenge those scaled strategies. We need to get back to building healthy websites that are more than old-hat aggressive growth projects. If you don’t think that's cool, let's see where your site is in the next five years.