The UK Gambling Commission reported 7,824,932 URLs associated with illegal gambling to search engines between April and September 2026, with 3,038,969 removed. Acting Chief Executive Sarah Gardner presented the figures at the regulator’s November 5 CEO Briefing, in a speech published the following day.
The six-month totals exceeded the 397,527 URLs reported and 266,667 removed during the previous financial year. The Commission also issued 1,005 cease-and-desist notices to operators and advertisers, compared with 741 throughout that earlier reporting period. These figures measure enforcement activity across periods of different lengths.
Website-level interventions were reported separately. Between April and September, 2,201 websites were referred to search engines for delisting, while 1,668 were taken down or geographically blocked. The comparable full-year figures were 1,068 and 1,134, respectively; removing a search result does not necessarily mean the underlying website has closed.
Research tracks engagement alongside disruption
The Commission’s November dashboard estimated that 0.6% of the population had engaged with identified illegal gambling websites during the preceding four weeks. An additional 0.4% had engaged during the preceding 12 months. Among respondents who had gambled online in the past four weeks, the corresponding recent-engagement estimate was 2.5%.
The dashboard identified 586 illegal gambling websites accessible to consumers in Great Britain during September. Estimated engagement was 12% higher than the preceding three-month average but 11% below September 2025. These measures describe identified websites and estimated engagement, rather than a verified total for money staked across the illegal market.
“We want to kick crime out of gambling,” said Sue Young, the Commission’s executive director of operations. The new figures follow separate banking research examining transactions and gambling-harm indicators. That study cautioned against interpreting its sample as a measure of the entire illegal market or proof of causation. The Commission says its dashboard combines supply, demand and disruption indicators because no single dataset can describe the market comprehensively.
