UKGC reports 7.7 million illegal gambling URLs for removal

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) referred 7.7 million illegal gambling URLs to search engines between July and September 2026. The regulators continues to increase the enforcement against unlicensed operators targeting British consumers. The Commission’s latest data shows 3,019,291 URLs that were removed during the period and 1,835 websites that were referred to search engines for delisting. The number of URLs reported represents a significant increase from the 147,721 recorded between April and June 2026. UKGC’s CEO Briefing, acting chief executive Sarah Gardner said: We’ve continued to push forward with our world leading approach to disruption and now, just over six months since the first £7m of the new funding arrived, we have been able to really start to scale up our capacity. There is more to do. These numbers only paint a picture of some of the activity we’re doing and some of what we need to do…but we are making progress here. During the period of April-September 2026, the regulator issued 1,005 cease-and-desist notices to advertisers and operators, compared with 741 throughout the previous financial year. During the first six months of 2026-27, the regulator reported 7,824,932 URLs to search engines, with 3,038,969 removed. It also referred 2,201 websites for delisting, more than double the 1,068 recorded in the whole of 2025-26. Other 1,668 websites were shut down or geo-blocked during the six-month period. Gardner added: We want to continue working with you on gathering intelligence, on building the evidence base and on frustrating unlicenced, illegal firms. According to the Commission’s report, around 77% of affected websites experienced reduced estimated traffic after the enforcement action. Total estimated traffic across sites with sufficient data also declined by 18%. The Commission has rolled out a new Illegal Gambling Index that evaluates consumers’ interactions with unregulated gambling web pages. In the initial reports, the data shows that 2.5% of the respondents who gambled in the past year visited illegal gambling web pages in the past month, while another 1.5% visited those sites over the past year but not recently. Out of all the respondents, including those who do not gamble, only 0.6% acknowledged visiting illegal online gambling sites during the last four weeks. The index is part of the UKGC strategy for tracking illegal gambling habits alongside enforcement data.