How We Rate Online Casinos
Every casino we cover gets one composite score out of 100, built from four signals. The point of a single number is to make sites comparable; the point of showing our work is so you can tell whether the number is resting on real evidence or one stray review.
casino.guru’s Safety Index, AskGamblers, Trustpilot and the App Store / Google Play scores, normalized to one scale and weighted by review volume so a thin page can’t out-shout a deep one.
Every AGCO penalty, order or warning against the operating company pulls the score down. A clean record, plus things like RG Check accreditation and independent game audits, pulls it up.
The withdrawal time each operator publishes by method, its fees, whether it pays out over Interac in CAD, and how long KYC takes. We favour sites that pay fast with no skim.
The welcome offer measured against the wagering you actually have to clear, worked out in dollars. The real cost of a bonus, not the headline number on the banner.
How the four signals come together
We normalize each independent rating to a common scale before combining anything, because a 9.2 on one site and an “above average” on another don’t mean the same thing out of the box. Ratings backed by thousands of reviews count for more than a page with a handful. On top of that base, a clean regulatory record, fast CAD payouts and an honest bonus push a score up; a string of AGCO orders, slow or fee-heavy withdrawals, or a bonus with punishing wagering pull it down.
Confidence: how much weight to put on the number
A score is only as good as the evidence under it, so every composite carries a confidence level, and we don’t publish one at all until an operator has at least two independent sources behind it.
- High confidence means several independent sources agree, usually a well-reviewed, long-running brand.
- Medium means the picture is solid but thinner, often a newer launch that’s licensed but hasn’t built a long public record yet.
- Low means we have enough to publish but you should read the detail, not just the headline number.
Right now 64 of the 68 casinos we score are cross-checked against two or more independent rating sources, and the average published score is 75 out of 100.
What we don’t do
We don’t claim to deposit real money and time a withdrawal at every site every week. That would be theatre. Instead we rank on the payout time each operator actually publishes for each method, alongside the independent ratings and the regulatory record. Where a figure is an estimate rather than an operator’s stated number, we say so on the page.
We also don’t sell position. A casino cannot pay to rank higher, and commission is not one of the scoring inputs. If an operator has a fine on record, the fine stays in the review. The full money story is on the affiliate disclosure page.
What it takes to be listed at all
Inclusion is the first filter, before any scoring. An operator has to be licensed to take Canadian players legally: registered with the AGCO and iGaming Ontario, or, from July 13, 2026, licensed in Alberta under the AGLC. Offshore and “Curacao” sites are left off, because there’s no Canadian regulator standing behind them if something goes wrong.
When the scores change
Ratings, payout times, bonuses and licences all move, so we re-check the data on a regular cycle and more often around big events like new launches. Each casino profile carries the date it was last reviewed, so you can see how fresh the number is.
Want the bigger picture? Read about the site, see the method applied on the best online casinos ranking, or open any casino review to see the signals for a single operator.