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Allan Stone, CEO at Intelitics, looks at recent changes to paid search ads and how a bigger budget is not the magic bullet for successful affiliate programs

Just as online sportsbook and casino operators embraced paid media and paid search as powerful and effective customer acquisition channels, the game has changed again, with new challenges to overcome.

What’s happened? At Google Marketing Live 2025, the search giant announced it will be rolling out ads inside AI-generated answers. This is going to have a seismic impact on paid search, but get it right and marketers can gain a significant advantage over their rivals.

Here’s what the change means for real money gambling brands.

1 – Placement isn’t placement anymore

Your ads won’t show up in traditional search blocks and instead will be embedded inside the AI answer itself. This changes how you write copy for sports-betting-related queries. For example, “Best odds” messaging hits differently when it’s inside an AI response.

2 – Fewer clicks but better players

AI answers will reduce total clicks, but the users who click through will be high-intent bettors. Expect click-through rates to drop, but player conversion rates to rise. In short, it will be a shift from quantity to quality.

3 – Context beats keywords

Forget exact-match keyword strategies, as now, you need to match the intent behind what the user is asking AI across a wide range of sport betting-related queries, from betting lines to game props and even deposit methods.

4 – SEO traffic is about to crater

The AI block dominates the entire screen, especially on mobile, and is likely to be the player’s first port of call. If you’ve been relying on organic search alone for player acquisition, expect fast traffic drops.

5 – Optimise for AI, not just search behaviour

Operators and their marketers will need to rethink how their sportsbook features, player reviews and betting content show up when AI crawls and indexes it. Getting into the AI result is now just as important as ranking in the top positions for competitive keywords.

For me, this is the biggest shift in paid acquisition since the iOS privacy changes hit Meta, and operators and their marketers need to respond immediately.

Those using Performance Max and Google’s AI Max program can get ads in AI Mode, and so long as they adapt their messaging and targeting to this new reality, they will capture higher intent players while their competitors scramble.

Another area where some sportsbooks continue to scramble is performance marketing, where underperforming partner programs are costing operators millions. But not for the reason they think…

It’s not about having partners; it’s about how you manage them. In our experience, the gap between top-performing programs and the rest isn’t budget, it’s the freedom given to affiliate partners.

We’ve evolved from the days when operators controlled every pixel of partner content, and this is welcome progress. But there’s still a disconnect between what we say and what we do – allow me to elaborate.

Operators talk about empowering partners but then micromanage their messaging. They say they want authentic voices but reject content that doesn’t match their corporate tone. They seek performance but restrict the very tactics that drive it.

The reality is that the best partners already understand their audience much better than the operator ever will. They’ve built trust and they know what resonates, but they need to be able to speak authentically.

This is why smart operators focus on frameworks rather than restrictions. And this should include clear brand guidelines that protect compliance, as well as consistent values that maintain brand integrity. It’s also important to provide flexible creative assets that partners can adapt.

But creative freedom is only half the equation.

Without proper measurement, the partnership program is flying blind, and, in most cases, operators can’t answer even the most basic questions like “Which partners drive actual player value beyond initial sign up?” and “What’s the true LTV of players from different channels?”.

When budgets get tight, the first things to be cut are partnerships that the operator can’t prove are working. The market leaders have figured this out and have built both flexibility and accountability into their programs.

And at Intelitics, we are proud to be working with a growing number of operators who are using our marketing-tech suite and services to streamline tracking, automate reporting and push into new customer acquisition channels, including paid media and paid search.

In short, we help them bring flexibility and accountability to their acquisition efforts.