One UK betting brand gets more AI recommendations than its nearest three rivals combined. And it isn’t the one ranking on Google.
New Receptional research on how ChatGPT recommends UK betting brands, and why good SEO alone won’t get you there.
TL;DR
- Bet365 leads AI brand recommendations in both UK football betting and horse racing betting. In every week we tracked, across both verticals.
- Good SEO doesn’t guarantee good AI visibility. For one query we tested, bet365 is invisible on page 1 of Google, but recommended first by ChatGPT.
- Several operators with visible sports-marketing investment barely register. Hollywoodbets and LeoVegas both score between 0.0% and 0.1% share of AI recommendations in football.
Your customer isn’t starting on Google any more. At least, not the way they used to.
They ask ChatGPT which bookmaker has the best offers for this weekend’s Premier League fixtures. They ask Gemini where to place a bet on the Grand National. They ask Perplexity which bookie gives the best odds on horse racing.
And an AI answers, providing a short list of brand names.
That short list is now the top of the funnel. If you aren’t on it, you don’t exist.
We wanted to know who’s on it.
What we measured
We ran 324 real customer queries across two UK iGaming verticals: football betting and horse racing betting. We collected the results on 5 different dates over several weeks. The queries covered everything from “best football odds” to “most reliable bookmaker for Cheltenham.” For each answer, we logged every brand mentioned and the position it appeared in.
We then scored each brand by its share of all recommendations. We call this AI share of voice. 315 brands were approved for inclusion.
The headline finding is clear.
Bet365 wins. Every week. Both verticals.
In football, bet365 holds 18.8% of all AI recommendations. The nearest competitor is William Hill at 5.4%. Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, and Betfair sit behind.
Put another way: bet365 is mentioned by ChatGPT and similar tools more often than its next three rivals combined.
In horse racing, the picture is similar. Bet365 again leads at 11.7%. The spread is tighter, but the ranking is the same. First place in every single week we measured.
No other brand achieved that consistency in either vertical.
Here’s why this matters for SEO
A view has taken hold in parts of the SEO community: do good SEO, and AI visibility looks after itself. Rank on Google, get recommended by ChatGPT.
It’s a comforting idea. It also doesn’t match our data.
Search Engine Land has run coverage in 2026, challenging that view directly. The short version: SEO isn’t disappearing, it’s diverging. AI search uses different signals. It weights them differently. And the brands that win on Google aren’t always the brands that win on ChatGPT.
Here’s one example from our data. We ran the query “football odds” through Google and through ChatGPT. It’s a high-volume commercial term, 4,200 monthly UK searches.
Google’s organic top 10 looked like this: Paddy Power, William Hill, Oddschecker, Ladbrokes, BoyleSports, Sky Bet, Betfred, Betfair, Betway, 32Red.
Bet365 is nowhere on page one. Not position 8. Not position 10. Simply not there.
ChatGPT’s top 10 for the same query starts: bet365, William Hill, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, Betfred.
Same query intent. Two completely different leaders.
If you’re running an SEO programme that treats Google rank as a proxy for AI visibility, you’re measuring the wrong thing.
We’ve already looked at how AI tools perceive UK betting brands across the wider market. That research is here. This new work looks at how AI recommends brands within specific verticals, starting with football and horse racing.
The intermediary question
One more pattern worth flagging.
In football, 82% of AI recommendations go to operators. 18% go to intermediaries like Oddschecker. Affiliates matter, but the operator still holds the conversation.
In racing, the split is 59% operators and 41% intermediaries. Racing Post alone takes 3.6% of all AI recommendations, making it the top non-operator in the vertical.
That’s a bigger role for intermediaries than in football, but operators still hold the majority. A common mistake would be to read the 41% figure and conclude the customer journey is controlled by affiliates. It isn’t. It just means affiliate relationships carry more weight in racing than in football, and that needs to be factored into your plans.
The brands that should be there, but aren’t
A handful of operators with genuine sports marketing investment barely register in our results.
Hollywoodbets and LeoVegas both score between 0.0% and 0.1% of football AI share of voice. Both have visible UK sports sponsorship. Both have spent on customer acquisition. Neither is showing up when ChatGPT recommends a bookmaker to a UK customer.
That gap between brand investment and AI recommendation is the most fixable problem in the data. These brands are close to the conversation. They aren’t in it.
What to do about it
If you’re a marketer at a UK betting brand, three questions are worth answering this quarter.
- What’s your AI share of voice in your category, and how does it compare to your Google share?
- If there’s a gap between the two, what’s driving it? Content, authority, brand mentions on third-party sites, or all three?
- What does a focused plan to close that gap look like, and what would it cost?
We run this analysis for clients. We measure your AI share of voice, map where the recommendations are flowing to competitors instead, and build a plan to close the gap.
If you want to see where your brand sits against the operators we tracked, get in touch. We’ll show you the numbers.
Read next: our deep dive on football betting AI visibility and horse racing AI visibility, with the full brand rankings in each vertical.
