AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini quote sentences, not links. Why the article around your iGaming link now decides if players hear your brand.
For years the link did most of the work. A casino or sportsbook page picked up a link from a strong publisher, Google counted it, and the words around it were often there just to hold it in place. What has changed is where players ask their questions. When a player asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI which casino pays out fastest, the reply is written from pages the tool has read, and it repeats sentences from them, not links.
So the article carrying your link now has two jobs. It still passes authority to your page in Google's results. It is also source material that an AI tool can quote from or pass over completely, and for an iGaming brand that decides whether a player hears your name at all.
The audience is too big for iGaming to treat as a side channel. OpenAI said in February 2026 that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users, and in July Sundar Pichai told investors the Gemini app had 950 million monthly users. Add Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a large share of the questions players used to type into a search box now get answered in a paragraph.
Google's own guidance on AI features in Search says AI Overviews and AI Mode pull in a wider and more diverse set of supporting links than classic results, and it asks site owners for helpful, reliable, people-first content. It also says clicks from results with AI Overviews are higher quality, with visitors more likely to spend longer on the site. For a casino or betting brand, that is the visitor worth having.
The most cited research here comes from a team at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, presented at the KDD conference in 2024. Their study of generative engine optimisation found that adding statistics, quotations from relevant sources and citations lifted a page's visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%. Keyword stuffing, the oldest trick in SEO, performed poorly.
That lines up with what we see in casino and betting answers. The articles that get picked up state things plainly: which payment methods a casino takes, why e-wallets usually clear faster than a bank transfer, what wagering terms mean in numbers. Vague copy written around a keyword gives an AI tool nothing to repeat.
The same study found the results varied by subject, which matters for gambling. What earns citations for travel or software content will not automatically carry over to a casino search in a given market.
The classic placed link sat inside three loose paragraphs, a keyword anchor and a sign-off. Google may still count that link. An AI tool reading the same page finds nothing worth quoting, so the brand is left out of the answer and the player asking which sportsbook to use does not see its name.
A specific article works differently. When it explains how PayPal, Skrill or Apple Pay withdrawals compare with a card, or gives a clear reason a brand suits a particular kind of player, there is a sentence the assistant can lift and attribute. That is also why brand mentions now matter alongside links for gambling brands: the link and the citation end up pointing at the same name.
Google's own tools point the same way. In July, Search Console added platform properties for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X, which show the clicks, impressions and top posts those accounts get from Google Search and Discover. Creators can use it without having a website at all.
For a casino or sportsbook brand, how you show up in Google is no longer only about your own pages. The articles, videos and posts published about you elsewhere are part of it, and Google now measures them, which puts more weight on what those pieces say.
This is also where local writing earns its place. An article on a Brazilian news site has to read as if it was written in Brazil, in Brazilian Portuguese, about things Brazilian readers follow. A UK football site needs a piece that sounds like football writers wrote it.
AI tools answer players in their own language, and in our experience a piece that reads like a translation gets passed over. The same goes for an article that ignores what the publisher normally covers, because it gives the tool no reason to trust it on that subject.
We place around 300 links a month across 30 publications in 20 markets, all in iGaming, and the writing is as much a part of the job as the placement. We know which content gets picked up by AI tools and which gets ignored, and we check which of our publishers AI cites for gambling searches in their own market.
If you want to see what that means for your brand in AI answers, our iGaming AI search page covers it.
For the core service across casino, sports betting and poker, see our casino and gambling link building page.
The link still matters for Google. The words around it now decide whether a player asking an assistant where to play hears your casino's name.
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