What South Africa plays: the most searched casino games

A market built on a few favourites

South Africa’s online casino market grew out of the big local bookmakers’ Spina Zonke-style lobbies, and it shows in what people search for. A small number of fruit and Asian-themed slots from Habanero and Pragmatic Play take most of the searches, led by Hot Hot Fruit, Lantern Luck, Slime Party and the Gates of Olympus games. Global titles that dominate in Europe barely register.

Searches and clicks tell slightly different stories. Hot Hot Fruit appears in the most searches, but Juicy Spins is the game people click through to most often: its searches are more specific, from players looking for the game itself and where to play it.

Slots first, crash games second

Slots take about nine in ten game searches. Crash and provably fair games such as Aviator and Aviamasters are a much smaller share of searches than their popularity in bookmakers’ apps suggests: players tend to find them inside the app rather than on Google. They are worth knowing about all the same, because they often carry higher published RTPs than slots, as our RTP report shows.

How we measured it

We took the top 1,000 Google search queries that showed CasinoSlots.co.za pages, from our Google Search Console account, and matched each query to a game in our dataset when the query names it. Impressions (how often our pages appeared for those searches) measure search demand; clicks show how often searchers chose our page. Queries that don’t name a specific game are left out of the game totals. The data shows search interest, not money wagered, and covers searches where our site appeared.