SisterSitesNZ is an independent editorial desk based in Aotearoa New Zealand. We exist for one reason: most casino comparison sites bury the single most useful fact about an online casino, which is the identity of the operator behind the brand. Two casinos that look entirely separate often sit on the same licence, run the same KYC pipeline and share a single complaints queue. A reader who knows that can make a sensible decision; a reader who does not know that is choosing between mirages. Our job is to put the corporate plumbing back on the page, in plain language, with the registry entries to back it up.
Who we are
We are a four-person team of working journalists with backgrounds in business, investigative and feature reporting across the New Zealand and UK press. None of us came from the gambling industry, and that is deliberate. We were brought together by a shared frustration with the casino content that dominates search results in this country — page after page that reads like editorial but is paid for line by line, ranked by who is paying the most that week, and silent on the operator structures underneath. We wanted to build the desk we wished had existed when our own friends and family started asking, "is this casino actually safe?"
The desk is small on purpose. A four-person newsroom can read every term page, time every withdrawal and personally sign off every ranking. A larger content farm cannot, and most do not pretend to. Editorial decisions are taken by Greg, fact-checked by Grant, tested by Simon, and held against our published standards by Joanna. Every page on the site is the product of those four steps in that order. When we get something wrong — and we will, periodically — we date the correction at the bottom of the page and explain what changed.
We work out of Auckland but our beat is the whole country. We treat the New Zealand reader as the user the site is built for: the person comparing two brands at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, trying to work out whether the second one is really a different company or just a different colour scheme. Everything on the site — the vocabulary, the helplines, the dollar figures, the regulator we cite — is chosen for that reader, not for an overseas audience or for search engines.
What we do
SisterSitesNZ is a sister-site directory. That means our core work is mapping which online casinos sit on which operator licences, and then publishing what we find in plain English. For each casino we cover we verify the licence on the regulator's public register, run a real deposit-and-withdrawal test, read the bonus terms in full, contact support with a routine question, and review the operator's complaint history across every brand it runs. Only then does the casino get a score, and the score is shown next to the working. If we cannot complete those steps, we do not give the brand a rating — we publish an explanatory note instead.
Around the directory we publish three things. A short library of guides that explain how sister-site networks work and why the distinction matters for self-exclusion, bonuses and dispute resolution. An ongoing blog covering the 2026 regulatory transition — the Online Casino Gambling Act, the Department of Internal Affairs licensing process and the operators deciding whether to stay in the New Zealand market. And a responsible-gambling section with the local helplines, the local self-exclusion tools and a frank acknowledgement that not every reader should be on a casino website at all.
Every page is dated, signed by a member of the team, and tied back to a published methodology. The licence number we cite for a casino is the one printed on the regulator's site, not the one printed in the casino's footer. The payout time we publish is the one we measured on a real account, not the one quoted in the cashier section. The bonus terms we summarise are the ones written by the casino's legal team, not the ones written by its marketing team. Where those two disagree — and they routinely do — we say so.
A sister site is a corporate fact, not a vibe. Two casinos that look alike are not related; two casinos on the same licence are, regardless of how different the homepages look.
Why we do it
The New Zealand online casino market is going through the largest regulatory change in its history. From late 2026, operators serving New Zealand players will need to hold a domestic licence or withdraw from the market. Some of the brands New Zealanders have used for years will disappear. Others will reappear under new names, with the same operator and the same compliance teams behind them. The marketing will tell one story; the licence register will tell another. Readers deserve a desk that reads the register.
We also do this work because the harm from getting it wrong is real. A reader who self-excludes from one brand and unknowingly signs up for a sister site is not making a free choice — they have been routed back into the same operator's funnel by a marketing team that knows exactly what it is doing. A reader who chases a bonus without reading a 60× wagering requirement is not losing money to bad luck; they are losing it to a term they were never invited to read. Putting those facts at the top of the page, in the same font size as the headline, is the cheapest piece of consumer protection we can ship. So we ship it.
And we do it because the alternative — leaving the New Zealand reader to choose between identical-looking comparison sites that never name an operator, never time a withdrawal and never publish a methodology — was the situation we walked into when we started researching this market. We thought it could be better. The site is our attempt to prove that.
How we try to help
The promise we make to readers is narrow and we intend to keep it narrow. We will tell you, for every casino on this site, who runs it and where the licence sits. We will tell you what the welcome offer actually costs once the wagering requirement is unpacked. We will tell you how long a withdrawal took the last time we tried, with the date next to the number. We will tell you which brands share an operator with the one you are looking at, so a decision about one is a decision about all of them. And we will tell you, plainly, when a brand is one we would not personally use.
We are equally clear about what we will not do. We do not target under-18s. We do not present unverified bonuses as if they were live. We do not run "sponsored" reviews, "featured" listings or partner badges that are really advertising dressed up as editorial. We do not publish anything an operator has written or paid for. If a brand on this site moves up or down in the rankings, the reason is the methodology — and the methodology is the same one we apply to every other brand on the site.
Our standards
The standards page sits behind every editorial decision the desk makes. The short version: rankings are decided by the published methodology and nothing else; corrections are dated and stay on the page; tip-offs and complaints get a human reply within a working week; and any reader who appears to be in trouble is pointed to the Gambling Helpline before anything else, no matter where on the site they are. The longer version, including how we handle source protection and how we resolve disputes with operators, is something we are happy to share on request.
Corrections, tips and contact
If you spot a factual error — a licence that has moved, a sister-site relationship we have missed, a bonus term that has changed since we last checked — we want to hear about it. The fastest route is the contact page. We correct factual errors on the page, dated, and we do not remove accurate information because an operator objects to it. The same applies to tip-offs: if you have first-hand experience of an operator behaving badly, send it in. We read everything and we protect sources.
And if any of this is starting to feel less like research and more like a problem, please stop and read our responsible gambling page. The Gambling Helpline is free, confidential and available 24/7 on 0800 654 655. There is no reader we would rather lose to that number than keep on this site.
The team
Four bylines, one rule book.
Every casino page, guide and blog on SisterSitesNZ is written, tested or signed off by one of the four journalists below.
Greg Bruce
Greg Bruce is a long-form New Zealand journalist and editor with more than twenty years of newsroom experience. Much of that has been spent writing and editing award-recognised features on culture, sport and the everyday lives of New Zealanders, and the same instincts now shape what gets published on SisterSitesNZ — and what does not.
At the desk Greg sets the editorial line, signs off every methodology change, and edits the sister-site investigations before they go live. His rule for the team is simple: if we cannot show the working — the licence number, the registry entry, the dated screenshot — we do not publish the claim.
Grant Bradley
Grant Bradley spent more than thirty years as a senior business journalist at the New Zealand Herald, covering aviation, tourism and the regulated industries that sit alongside them. He has filed from boardrooms, select committees and trade-show floors across the Asia-Pacific region, and brings that institutional knowledge to the regulated-gambling beat.
At SisterSitesNZ Grant leads coverage of the 2026 Online Casino Gambling Act, the Department of Internal Affairs licensing process and the operators recalibrating for the New Zealand market. His brief is to explain what is actually changing, in plain language, with the source documents linked underneath.
Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is a contributing journalist whose work has appeared in the BBC, the Daily Mail, MSN, Yahoo and Nature, among others. At SisterSitesNZ he writes the desk's hands-on reviews — the deposits, the play sessions, the withdrawal tests — and the post-mortems when something goes wrong.
Simon is the reason the payout times published on this site reflect a real wallet rather than a marketing slide. If a brand quietly adds a fresh KYC check between deposit and cash-out, Simon is usually the first to notice; if a cashier page promises 24-hour withdrawals and the money lands in five days, he is the one who times it.
Joanna Norris
Joanna Norris is a former newspaper editor and Chief Content Officer at Stuff, and has spent her career building newsrooms that are useful to the communities they serve. She chairs SisterSitesNZ's standards committee.
She is responsible for the policies that sit underneath every page on this site: a published complaints process, dated corrections, a hard line on responsible-gambling content, and a firewall between editorial work and any commercial activity. If a story or a listing is not defensible against those standards, it does not run.