GPWA Times Magazine: Crafting Complaint Content

[GPWA Daniel]

Milan Novakovic, CEO of Hirequarters, provides essential strategies for writers to balance technical accuracy, legal compliance, and engaging storytelling to effectively inform and protect players.

(This article was originally published in the July 2024 issue of the GPWA Times Magazine.)

[edgarf76]

Very Interesting.

[NoDepositCasinos]

Awesome article. That's why content writing can't be dirty cheap: it requires a lot of specialized knowledge and investigation, not to mention the legal responsibility.

[Karri]

Interesting, but in reality this boils down to "don't use these terms". Might be a bit different if you're a CEO, but how many of them are writing bulk content?

[Pokerface]

Very interesting article indeed, thanks for sharing. Always welcome feedback from programs on any reviews to ensure contact is up to date and accurate.

[themilann]

Bit late to come back to this thread (only noticed it again now), but the topic has aged really well. If anything it’s more relevant after the last couple of Google core updates and the AI explosion.

Thanks for the comments back then – edgar76, NoDepositCasinos, Karri, Pokerface – I appreciate you taking the time to read it.

A couple of extra thoughts from what we’ve seen since the article went out:

1. Compliance is now an SEO problem as much as a legal one.
When “free spins”, wagering, KYC or geo-availability are described inaccurately across dozens of pages, it’s not just a regulator risk. It tanks trust signals, increases complaints/refunds, and in some cases we’ve seen it correlate with drops after quality updates. Google doesn’t need to understand the law. It just has to see that users feel misled.

2. “Dirty cheap” content is even more dangerous in the AI era.
Before, cheap bulk content was just thin and generic. Now, cheap bulk content + unreviewed AI is thin, generic and often non-compliant, especially for markets like Ontario, UK, US state-by-state, sweeps vs RMG, etc. You can pump out 100 reviews in a week and still end up with liability and no rankings.

3. Karri’s point about “don’t use these terms” is fair – but that’s just the starting layer.
Every serious brand or agency I know does keep a banned/allowed terms list (“no ‘risk-free’, no ‘guaranteed wins’” etc.). But the real work is:

• training writers why those terms are an issue,
• giving them compliant alternatives that still sell, and
• putting a proper review process on anything that mentions bonuses, licensing, or safer gambling.
  Without that, a term list is just a band-aid.

4. AI should sit inside the process, not replace it.
We do use AI internally, but always inside a framework: brief → AI draft → human editor with compliance checklist → (if needed) legal or AM review. Anything that skips that last step is asking for trouble.

Curious how others are handling this now that AI output is everywhere:
– Do you let writers use AI on compliance-sensitive pages at all?
– Do you run a separate legal/compliance pass, or is it all on the editor/SEO?

Always happy to swap notes. This is one of those areas where cutting corners looks cheap in the short term and very expensive later.

[Karri]

3. Karri’s point about “don’t use these terms” is fair – but that’s just the starting layer.
Every serious brand or agency I know does keep a banned/allowed terms list (“no ‘risk-free’, no ‘guaranteed wins’” etc.). But the real work is:

• training writers why those terms are an issue,
• giving them compliant alternatives that still sell, and
• putting a proper review process on anything that mentions bonuses, licensing, or safer gambling.
  Without that, a term list is just a band-aid.

The problem remains the same, the "real work" never happens. Though that's me as freelance writer, I don't know if in-house writers get trained in this (or if they just click through a powerpoint). The big issue is how the whole responsible gaming & compliance is fundamentally broken.

[themilann]

The problem remains the same, the "real work" never happens. Though that's me as freelance writer, I don't know if in-house writers get trained in this (or if they just click through a powerpoint). The big issue is how the whole responsible gaming & compliance is fundamentally broken.

You’re absolutely right – in most places, the “real work” never happens. The term list gets made, maybe there’s a one-off PowerPoint, and then everyone goes back to business as usual.

At HIREQUARTERS, we’ve had to build the opposite model just to stay sane. New writers go through internal sessions not only on “what not to say”, but on:
– industry basics and how the money actually flows;
– lingo and style for different markets (US vs UK vs Nordics etc.);
– vertical specifics (casino vs sports vs skill games / sweeps / prediction markets);
– the regulatory/compliance quirks in key jurisdictions.

And we keep that updated. Every time Ontario, some US state, or a regulator like the UKGC/ACMA does something new, it ends up in our internal docs and training. Otherwise, you’re just delivering guesswork.

But I agree there’s a ceiling to what content people can fix on our own. A lot of what’s fundamentally broken, like responsible gaming “lip service”, how compliance is enforced (or not), and the trust gap between players and operators. Even between affiliates and operators, the level sits way above the writer/editor level. Until that foundation changes, we’re often just the ones trying to make dysfunctional setups slightly less bad on the page.

Curious from your freelance side: how often do you get the space to push back on wording or claims when you know they’re off, versus “just write what’s in the brief and don’t rock the boat”?