Q&A: Gambling.com Group CEO on the company’s “AI-proof” business model

Gambling.com Group’s $160m acquisition of Odds Holdings, announced in December 2024, ended up steering the business in a new direction away from its traditional affiliate roots – and the rewards of this partial pivot have become evident.

The deal saw the Nasdaq-listed company add B2B odds data platform OpticOdds and subscription-based odds comparison product OddsJam to a portfolio which already contained sites such as Gambling.com, Bookies.com and Casinos.com.

Full-year 2025 financial results showed how valuable those newly acquired assets have proven to be: Gambling.com Group reported record revenue of $46.2m for the fourth quarter, while full-year revenue amounted to $165.4m, with much of the growth attributed to the contributions of OpticOdds and OddsJam.

Sports data services look to be the way forward for the company, according to group CEO Charles Gillespie, especially with the levels of “garbage” harming SEO efforts and organic search results. And while markets such as Finland and the UK will prove to be problematic in the future, management may have big plans in the US if the current prediction markets boom doesn’t fizzle out.

EGR: Revenue hit a new quarterly high of $46.2m in Q4 2025. How did the results fit in with management’s expectations?

Charles Gillespie (CG): They were in line with our latest expectations. We’ve been very focused on the sports data services side of our business, not the affiliate side. It’s growing very nicely and is up to 26% of group revenue. That’s a very attractive business.

It’s AI-proof because it’s based on data and not software or affiliate marketing. We are putting a lot into that and we think it’ll continue to be the growth driver in 2026, but the affiliate business is still doing well. If you look at our peers, we grew every quarter in 2025 – we’re the only affiliate that can say that out of the listed companies. Catena [Media] had a decent Q4 but, other than that, we led the way every quarter in 2025.

EGR: Did you expect the level of impact from OpticOdds and OddsJam?

CG: Out of all the different parts of the business, that’s the part which would be most likely to outperform. That’s OpticOdds and OddsJam, which we bought at the beginning of 2025, but also [DFS resource] RotoWire, which is a big data company in the US that we bought after the IPO at the beginning of 2022.

EGR: Would you say those acquisitions have performed as expected?

CG: OpticOdds and OddsJam have been much better than expected. Our expectations were already pretty high, but they have exceeded those. With RotoWire, it’s a bit of different story. We bought that business as a data company and not an affiliate, and they make money from selling subscriptions to both consumers and businesses. We didn’t want to interfere with that core business because they’d been doing it for 25 years when we bought them.

What we wanted to do was set up the affiliate business to leverage a lot of their authority and content and everything else on the RotoWire website, and we did that. We took very few risks with the RotoWire subscription business but that changed last year. We’ve upped our ambition and are starting to take more risks and change the product to something we think can scale much further.

EGR: Poor search dynamics were cited as a factor that negatively impacted revenue and EBITDA. Can you expand a bit more on what contributed to that?

CG: There’s been a huge increase in the amount of spam in the search results, especially for ‘UK casino’. If you search for ‘best online casinos’, you’re going to see quite a bit of garbage in the search results – hacked websites, spammy websites, offshore stuff. This has always been part of the search game. None of that’s new, but what is new is the intensity of a lot of these bad actors in terms of deploying these spammy assets. I think a lot of that is AI-driven.

What is also new is the fact Google seems less focused on cleaning it up than ever before. They’re obviously at the forefront of AI and have all sorts of extremely interesting things going on outside of online gambling search, and therefore they’re just not putting the same level of attention or talent on the anti-spam team that they did historically. Whereas in the past, you would see an uptick in spam and a month later it would be fixed and gone.

This has been ongoing for some time, and it has affected every large affiliate. Our SEO team has collaborations with the SEO teams at other major affiliates, and we trade notes to figure out what’s going on. Everybody’s been affected by this, but to varying degrees.

Our strategy has always been big brands. We focused on Gambling.com and Casinos.com, and when these attacks are effective, and you’re not concentrated on big brands like that, it’s hard. We’re still making a lot of money; we’re just not making quite as much as we thought we would.

EGR: Non-SEO revenue outpaced SEO revenue for the first time in Q4. Do you expect this to continue?

CG: As we diversify the business into other channels, that proportion of SEO revenue is coming down, and I would expect the non-SEO proportion to continue to climb. There’s just more opportunity there. At the same time, the SEO proportion could easily bounce back. I don’t think it’s going to dramatically change, but our expectation is the non-SEO side grows faster.

EGR: How do you plan to deal with the upcoming regulatory changes in the Finnish market as the shift to a regulated commercial market was highlighted in the earnings report as a potential drag on 2026 performance?

CG: Finland’s going from grey to white. No one’s paying taxes at the moment, there are no restrictions on advertising, and the Finns already gamble quite a bit online. Adding in taxes and regulations isn’t going to help the size of the Finnish market. They’ve also put these weird rules in place where you can’t do performance marketing deals. I think they’re the first country that’s done that.

We were very active in lobbying to try to fix that. So far, we have not succeeded, but there’s always a chance they’ll come around. I think, in the future, we will have Finnish revenue, but it’s not going to be like it was. It’s one of those odd markets which was incredibly lucrative for a lot of affiliates for a very long time pre-regulation.

EGR: The results also cited the UK as a potentially troublesome market given the increase in remote gaming duty to 40% from April. How are you bracing for this impact?

CG: Invest elsewhere. The UK market’s not going to fall apart, but at a certain point these tax rates get so high that the consumer experience gets so bad and more consumers start going offshore. That’s what I worry about most for the UK, as the tax increases were worse than expected. The UK has always been quite a big and important online gambling market, and it’s just not going to be quite as important going forward.

EGR: Turning attention to the US, how hopeful are you for progress with online casino and sports betting legalization given recent advancements in Missouri, which launched legal sports betting  in December, and Maine, which approved online casino legislation earlier this year?

CG: It’s been pretty limited. Maine is not going to move the needle for anyone as it has very few operators. I think all the energy in the US at the moment is around prediction markets, for precisely this reason. Momentum around legislation at the state level has stalled, but people clearly want these products, and industrious entrepreneurs are finding a way to provide them.

With the blessing of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), you’ve got this explosion in prediction markets and, let’s be honest, it’s a pretty good product. It’s better in many respects for the end consumer than traditional state-regulated sports betting. The odds are better and there are no real limits. If you are sharp, you will not be banned, you will be embraced and your action will be welcomed. That’s a pretty big deal.

We’ve seen the exchange model play out, like with Betfair in the UK. For people who have been in the industry a long time, this isn’t the first time they’ve seen this, but I think it’s a product which is uniquely suited to the American market.

Americans grow up buying and selling stocks. It’s culturally central to the American experience, which bodes well for it in the future. At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to court cases – probably the Supreme Court – and whether or not these states can try to avoid federal regulation, which I don’t think they can. It’s pretty clear it’s valid federal law. That’s just how the US system works. It’s certainly one to watch, but I think prediction markets has a bright future.

EGR: Will you look to do more with prediction markets in the future?

CG: We do a lot with prediction markets now. We sell OpticOdds data to hedge funds, which are trading on their prediction markets. We can do marketing and data for the prediction markets themselves. There are prediction market features we’ve added to the OddsJam consumer product, which people find really fascinating and interesting. From a very early stage, we had the data between the sports betting companies and the prediction markets mapped, so you can easily compare odds and exchange pricing on the same event.

EGR: How about sweepstakes casinos?

CG: I think sweeps in the US have probably already hit their high-water mark, but it is still an important business for a lot of people. It’s very small for us, but where we are comfortable with the legal situation we will work with sweeps casinos, although we are very selective about where and who we work with.

EGR: How are you looking to incorporate AI into your products more?

CG: We’ve made the point internally with our team for the last several years, that AI is a big thing coming and everyone needs to get on board. We intend to do nothing short of reinventing the entire organization to be AI-first.

That’s not about using a chatbot; it’s about deploying agents that work for you and do your bidding 24/7, to really scale up that capacity to leverage that more or less ‘free’ intelligence. We’ve got a huge number of AI projects inside the business. It’s really front and centre for everything we’re doing at the moment. Our people must embrace AI, or this may not be the right company for them.

EGR: What did you make of Genius Sports’ $1.2bn acquisition of Legend, the affiliate behind brands like Covers.com and Casino.org? Were you surprised to see a deal of such magnitude?

CG: I think everybody in the industry was surprised to read that press release. I know Nick Kisberg [Legend founder]; he’s a great guy and a very talented affiliate. I take my hat off to him. That was an incredible transaction and it’s an incredible business.

We’ve had our eyes on Genius for some time because we’re executing the same strategy as them but in reverse; instead of going from sports data services and adding on affiliates and marketing, we’re doing the opposite. We started with affiliate and marketing and are now pushing aggressively into sports data services. It helps diversify the business and also builds EBITDA and revenue in a category where I think investors are more likely to give us a healthy valuation.

It’s a deal we’re watching closely and congratulations to all involved. I’m not sure we’re going to see one that big anytime soon.

EGR: Gambling.com Group shares have fallen to an all-time low of below $4. How disappointing is this and why do you think the market has reacted this way?

CG: Obviously it’s frustrating but this is life as a public company. You just need to play these things to your advantage. We have bought back a fair amount of stock. We bought nearly all the stock we issued in the IPO, and we’ve quadrupled EBITDA and quadrupled revenue. If you have a long-term view, it’s a very attractive buying opportunity.

We’re a technology company. Technology investors are there for growth, and that’s what you need to deliver. We’re still growing but not quite as quickly as we were in the past. We plan to reignite that growth, and then I’m sure investors will pile back in.