Over the past few months, we’ve run three live webinars on AI search visibility, specifically for marketing, SEO, and digital leaders in iGaming. More than 40 senior professionals from 20 of the largest operator brands in the UK attended across the series.
But four questions came up again and again, asked by different people, from different brands, in different sessions. CMOs, Heads of Digital, SEO leads, people with commercial accountability for search performance, trying to make sense of a shift they can feel but can’t yet fully measure.
Here are those four questions, and our honest answers.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
It’s a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer, not a deflection.
No. It’s not just SEO with a new name. But your SEO foundations still matter. Here’s the distinction worth holding onto.
Traditional SEO is about position. You produce content, earn links, build authority, and climb a results page. When someone searches on Google, your goal is to appear as high as possible in that list of blue links. The whole industry, two decades of it, has been built around that mechanic.
AI visibility works differently. It’s not about where you appear on a list. It’s about whether you’re mentioned at all when someone asks an AI platform a question. There’s no list. There’s just an answer. And either your brand is part of it, or it isn’t.
The other key difference is how trust gets established. Google used links as a proxy for authority. The more credible sites linked to you, the higher you ranked. AI platforms don’t work that way. They’ve learned about your brand from everything the internet says about you: your website, your reviews on Trustpilot, discussions on Reddit, press coverage, affiliate content. A link isn’t required. What matters is what’s being said and whether it’s consistent, current, and credible.
That’s not a reason to abandon your SEO work. A well-structured, authoritative website is still where AI starts when forming a view of your brand. But it’s not sufficient on its own. A brand can sit at the top of Google for its core terms and barely register on ChatGPT.
Try it. Ask ChatGPT where to bet on the Premier League. See which brands come up. Then consider what it would take to be one of them.
How do I know if AI is recommending my brand?
The honest answer is that most brands don’t. And that’s the problem.
Here’s a concrete example that makes it real. We asked ChatGPT for football predictions, the kind of question millions of people are now typing into AI platforms rather than searching on Google. Not one bookmaker appeared in the answer. Across three different variations of the same question, roughly ten brands were mentioned in each response: Forebet, SofaScore, Flashscore, Stratarea. But there was no mention of Bet365, Ladbrokes, or Paddy Power.
These are brilliant, well-resourced brands that rank well on Google and spend heavily on acquisition. But right now, they’re largely invisible to the audience typing those questions into AI, the same audience they’re paying to reach through other channels. We’ve been tracking exactly this pattern in our ongoing AI visibility research.
Meanwhile, most operators are tracking Google rankings, organic traffic, and CPA. They have dashboards full of data, but what they don’t have is any clear picture of what ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview is actually saying about them, or whether it’s saying anything at all.
This matters now because behaviour is shifting. Under 45s are increasingly using AI platforms as a first port of call, not a secondary check. And AI-generated overviews are replacing traditional blue links for a growing range of queries. The audience is already there. The question is whether your brand is.
You can start simply. Just ask AI platforms the questions your customers would ask and see what comes back. Reddit is also worth looking at here, not as a data source, but as a signal. The way people phrase questions on Reddit, conversational, specific, intent-driven, is very close to the way they’re asking AI. “I mainly bet on football accumulators at the weekend, which site gives me the best odds and a decent app?” That’s a Reddit thread. It’s also an AI query. It tells you something about how your audience is actually searching, and whether your brand is equipped to answer.
The data is thinner than Google. The signals are harder to read. That’s an honest reality, and CMOs will need to get comfortable with less certainty than they’re used to. But that’s not a reason to wait. It’s a reason to move while most competitors haven’t.
A structured AI visibility audit is the more rigorous starting point. Find out more about our AI visibility research here.
Who should be responsible for AI SEO?
In lots of organisations, the responsibility for marketing to LLMs (often called AI SEO) is the responsibility of the SEO department. Perhaps because it’s got SEO in the title. But AI visibility doesn’t sit neatly with just one team. It cuts across the whole organisation in ways that most brands haven’t worked through yet.
Think about what AI platforms are drawing on when they form a view of your brand. Your website, yes, but also what your compliance team publishes about responsible gambling and licensing. What your operations team can demonstrate about payout speeds and customer service. What your brand team has said in press interviews. Your reviews on Trustpilot. What affiliate and review sites wrote about you three years ago, when you were a different business.
That last point came up directly in one of our webinars. A senior marketer flagged that their biggest challenge wasn’t a lack of content. It was older affiliate-led material that no longer reflected who they are today. AI was surfacing it. And there was no quick fix because it spanned dozens of sites they didn’t control.
That’s not an SEO problem. It’s a brand reputation problem with a commercial impact on search visibility.
A useful way to frame it is to ask three questions about your brand.
- What does your own website say about you?
- What does the wider internet say?
- And is that the story you’d choose to tell?
In an environment where AI platforms are synthesising all of that content into a single recommendation, the gap between those answers matters enormously.
Improving AI visibility is a cross-functional brief. Marketing can flag it and own the strategy. But fixing it takes compliance, ops, brand, and PR in the room.
Who’s winning right now?
The data tells a clear story, and it’s not one most operators will find comfortable.
Of the 50 UK operators we analysed, six consistently appear in AI recommendations across relevant betting queries. The other 44+ are largely absent, and that includes some of the best-funded, most recognisable brands in the market.
The gap isn’t budget. The brands appearing most aren’t necessarily the biggest spenders. It comes down to clarity of positioning and the kind of content they’ve built.
Football queries make the pattern particularly clear. For that category, it’s not the major operators dominating AI responses, but it’s the stats sites: Forebet, SofaScore, and Flashscore, platforms built entirely around data, analysis, and answering questions. They share the same audience as the bookmakers, and they’re winning the discovery moment for a meaningful range of queries.
The reason is straightforward. On Google, bettors searched quickly and simply. Short queries. High intent. The operators were built to capture that. On AI platforms, the questions are longer and more contextual, such as: “Where can I get match predictions and the best odds for this weekend?” That kind of query rewards the brand that answers it properly, not the brand with the highest acquisition budget.
Stats sites are built around answers. Operators are built around odds. For many queries, AI will reward the former.
That’s not a permanent disadvantage. It’s a content strategy problem, and it can be solved. The operators who recognise this and start building content that genuinely answers audience questions will pull ahead. Those who wait will find the gap harder to close because they’ll be competing against brands that already have traction.
Very few operators are actively building for AI visibility right now. The window is open. And it won’t stay that way for long.
So where does your brand stand?
Most brands don’t know. That’s the honest answer, and it’s also the starting point.
You don’t need everything solved immediately. But knowing what AI is saying about you, and where you’re visible or not, gives you something to act on.
We’ve built an AI visibility audit to do exactly that. Find out more.
