The Five Terms Every UK Affiliate Page Must Show

The week regulators moved the goalposts onto the page

For years, bonus compliance lived in the fine print. An operator could publish a headline offer, "200% up to 500 GBP", and let the obligations sit behind a "T&Cs apply" link. The link existed. A diligent player could find it. Regulators, broadly, accepted that arrangement.

That arrangement is over.

An analysis circulated this week walked through what the UK Gambling Commission's 2026 bonus advertising regime now demands in practice, and the shift is sharper than most affiliates have absorbed. Since 19 January 2026, every UK casino, and every affiliate that promotes one, must surface five specific material terms at the point of offer, before a player can click claim. A buried link no longer counts. A term that only appears after registration is, in the Commission's framing, a hidden term, and a hidden term is a breach.

The five terms, and why they are a display problem

The five material terms the UKGC now expects to be visible up front are:

• Wagering requirements, now capped at 10x the bonus value
• Maximum bet permitted while wagering a bonus
• Eligible games that contribute to the wagering requirement
• Expiry window for the bonus
• Maximum cashout cap on bonus winnings

Read that list again and notice what it is not. It is not a list of things that must exist somewhere on the page. It is a list of things that must be seen. The distinction sounds pedantic. It is the whole story.

A term present in the page's HTML but rendered in tiny grey text below the fold technically exists. A wagering figure tucked inside a collapsed accordion exists. An expiry window that only renders after a cookie banner is dismissed exists. Under the old reading, "it is on the page" was a defence. Under the 2026 regime, the question is what a real player actually sees in the moment they decide to claim, and that is a visual question, not a text-search question.

Affiliates are inside the perimeter now

The most important sentence for anyone running affiliate pages is this: affiliates sit inside the same regulatory perimeter as the operators they feature.

The Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice bind the operator. But the operator is held strictly liable for its marketing chain, and the affiliate is the marketing chain. When an affiliate landing page describes a non-compliant incentive, or describes a compliant one in a non-compliant way, the operator inherits the exposure, and the affiliate inherits the operator's reaction: a takedown demand, a rewrite request, sometimes a terminated agreement, often within days.

This is not theoretical. The same 2026 package that introduced the five-term rule also banned mixed-product incentives, promotions that ask a player to bet on sport to unlock casino spins, or the reverse. Every affiliate creative, comparison table, and review page describing a cross-vertical unlock had to be retired or rewritten. Pages that were perfectly compliant in December became liabilities in January, without a single word on them changing.

Why the old way of checking does not catch this

Most affiliate compliance checks still run on text. A crawler pulls the HTML, searches for the word wagering, finds it, and marks the page clean. That workflow was never strong. Against the 2026 rules it is actively misleading.

A keyword crawler cannot tell you:

• Whether the wagering figure sits above the fold or three scrolls down
• Whether the max cashout cap is visible or hidden inside a collapsed tab
• Whether the five terms render before the claim button or only after it
• Whether a term is legible or set in a colour that fails against its background

Every one of those is now a compliance fact. None of them is answerable by reading source code. They are answerable only by rendering the page the way a player's browser does, and looking at it.

What visual AI actually changes

This is the gap kaspero was built for. kaspero renders affiliate pages the way a user sees them and applies visual AI to ask the questions a regulator now asks: are all five material terms present in the visible viewport at the point of offer? Is the wagering requirement legible without interaction? Does anything material live below the fold or behind a click?

The result is the difference between a green checkmark that means the word appears in the HTML and one that means a player would actually see the term before they claim. For an affiliate managing hundreds of operator pages across dozens of brands, that is the difference between assuming compliance and being able to evidence it.

It also changes the speed of the response. When a rule lands, as the five-term rule did and as the mixed-product ban did, the affiliate's real exposure is not the rule itself. It is the lag between the rule taking effect and every affected page being found and fixed. A visual scan across an entire portfolio turns that lag from a multi-week manual audit into a same-day report.

The takeaway

The UKGC's 2026 reforms did something quietly structural. They moved the definition of compliance from what a page contains to what a page shows. That is a move from text to pixels, and it leaves keyword-based checking a step behind the regulation it is meant to enforce.

For affiliates, the practical instruction is simple. Stop asking whether the terms are on the page. Start asking whether a player would see them. The regulator already has.