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How AI Search is Redrawing the iGaming Visibility Map
As AI-driven search begins to shape how players discover betting and casino brands, new research from Toucan International shows visibility is rapidly concentrating among a handful of legacy operators. George Webb, SEO Director at Toucan International, explains why AI search is not simply “SEO 2.0”, why brand authority now outweighs rankings, and why operators that fail to build consensus risk becoming invisible.
George, what motivated Toucan International to analyse iGaming brand performance across AI Search platforms, and how does this differ from traditional SEO benchmarking?
Tere’s been a growing debate across SEO and digital marketing about whether AI Search is simply an extension of traditional SEO or something fundamentally different. We wanted to explore that distinction properly.
Our goal wasn’t to make a definitive conclusion, but to put forward evidence showing that AI search behaves differently and should be treated as its own discipline. Unlike traditional SEO, this isn’t about chasing blue-link rankings. When we ran the study, only seven of all the prompts we tested resulted in any link at all back to a brand website. Tat alone tells you this isn’t primarily a traffic-driving channel for iGaming at the moment.
What we wanted to understand was how visible brands actually are when users ask AI platforms high-intent questions - and how much AI Search is already shaping perception, even if it’s not yet driving clicks at scale.
Your AI Visibility Score looks at positioning, sentiment and linking. Which of those signals proved most decisive?
Trust and sentiment were by far the most decisive factors. If a user asks an AI platform, “Who is the best betting site?” and your brand carries negative sentiment, the model simply won’t recommend you. AI systems are designed to surface consensus and minimise risk, so positive sentiment becomes critical.
Positioning also matters because these systems don’t behave like search engines. If you’re not named early in the response, you’re unlikely to be named at all. Linking, by contrast, played a much smaller role in iGaming - fewer than two per cent of mentions included a direct link back to the brand.
Te top 10 brands account for almost 58 per cent of total AI share of voice. Is AI search reinforcing legacy dominance rather than levelling the playing field?
From what we’ve seen in iGaming, absolutely. Te brands dominating AI visibility are the same ones with decades of brand history - Bet365, William Hill, the Flutter brands. Tey’ve accumulated reviews, press coverage, forum discussions, Wikipedia entries and social mentions over many years. Tose are precisely the sources large language models are trained on.
A newer challenger brand simply doesn’t have that depth of historical data behind it yet, which makes breaking through significantly harder in AI-driven environments.
Does that mean it will become harder for challenger brands to compete as AI Search adoption grows?
Yes, particularly if more users start their discovery journey with AI platforms instead of Google. In traditional SEO, a challenger brand might be happy reaching page two or three as part of a longer-term strategy. In AI Search, there is no page two. You are either included in the response or you don’t exist at all. Tat’s why brand building and trust building become so important. Te earlier brands invest in that, the better positioned they’ll be as AI adoption increases.
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