US gambling firms’ $3.9B ad spend sparks trust concerns
America’s gambling operators are throwing billions at celebrity partnerships and TV commercials while the numbers that actually matter to investors and regulators are quietly struggling. The inaugural Gaming Trust Index, published by 5WPR, found that the US gambling and gaming sector spent an estimated $3.9 billion on advertising and marketing in 2025. Of that, $1.42 billion went to national television and another $520 million to celebrity and athlete ambassador deals.
Yet only $90 million was directed towards earned media and PR, and responsible gambling programmes received even less, just $60 million, which works out to less than two cents for every marketing dollar spent. The index, built on advertising data from Kantar Media, MediaRadar, and iSpot.tv, and financial disclosures from operators including Flutter Entertainment, MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, Penn Entertainment, and DraftKings. To understand what the numbers mean in practice, SiGMA News spoke exclusively with Jason Heller, Senior Vice President at 5WPR’s Consumer Technology division.
Celebrities aren’t converting
The Gaming Trust Index quantify what many CMOs have quietly known for some time: celebrity endorsements are not delivering proportional value. Spending $520 million on ambassadors while investing less than $60 million in responsible gambling communications yields a ratio of nearly 9-to-1.
Heller noted, “Celebrity endorsements certainly aren’t the leading factor in increased regulatory scrutiny, but the industry is certainly considering more than just customer acquisition when evaluating the cost-benefit of these marketing spends.”
AI is rewriting discovery
The second major finding of the index, and the one that arguably generated the most industry conversation, concerns what Heller calls the GEO gap: the widening chasm between what an AI system knows about a gambling brand and what that brand wants potential customers to believe about it.
The mechanism is straightforward. When a bettor who has never placed a wager types a question into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI, or Google’s AI Overviews, “Which sportsbook has the best odds for NFL games?” or “Which casino is the most transparent?”, the AI doesn’t consult a company’s marketing materials. It draws from indexed, retrievable content across the web. A brand that hasn’t built the content infrastructure to be cited as a credible source in that landscape doesn’t appear. The customer is acquired before they ever visit a brand’s website.
Heller explained, “The legacy, traditionally land-based brands are behind on technical SEO and GEO because they’ve built their digital presence around converting customers rather than being cited sources. Their customer portals and sign-up engines are designed to be sleek and frictionless, which makes them highly effective for customer acquisition and customer experience, but virtually useless as a source of information for LLMs.”
The solution is a shift in how operators think about the customer journey. “Showing up there with credibility will increase the likelihood that their brand makes the shortlist.”
Legacy brands losing citation war
According to the US Sports Betting and Gaming AI Visibility Index 2026, five operators captured more than 92 per cent of the AI citation share, FanDuel and DraftKings, which together hold roughly 78 per cent of the market by GGR.
Heller noted, “The brands losing ground including legacy casino operators have narrow citation footprints. They show up for the categories they already own, but miss the ones driving new bettor discovery. That’s the GEO gap in practice.”
Interestingly, the greatest spenders aren’t necessarily the victors. Because every ESPN editorial mention produces retrievable LLM material, ESPN Bet punches substantially above its market share in AI citations. Nearly all of Florida’s questions about regulatory exclusivity are dominated by Hard Rock. No amount of TV advertising can match these structural benefits.
$3.9B leadership problem
Heller argues the $3.9 billion misallocation is not primarily a marketing mistake. It is a leadership mistake. Executives often view PR and responsible gambling as cost centers, not retention engines. Unlike celebrity ads or sweepstakes, PR and responsible gambling are long-tail investments that compound over time.
Additionally, the index reveals a new process by which trust deficiencies become balance-sheet items rather than reputational issues. In published studies on publicly traded companies, ESG experts are starting to monitor responsible gaming investment as a percentage of marketing expenditures.
Heller stated, “Credit markets and equity analysts’ price forward risk, and a company with a deteriorating trust profile is a company with higher regulatory friction, higher customer acquisition costs, and more crisis cycles ahead. Responsible gambling investment compounds over time, unlike advertising spend. When analysts have a standardised score to cite, a low Trust Index stops being a reputation problem and becomes a balance sheet problem.”
Michigan case and Texas strategy
The most actionable section of analysis concerns what comes next, specifically how operators should position themselves in the two largest and most consequential untapped markets in the United States: Texas and California.
Michigan‘s 2021 legalisation offers a case study. Operators who had already invested in earned marketing and community attracted new customers 40 per cent faster than rivals relying on launch-day ad blitzes.
For Texas and California, that clock is running now. Heller clarified, “For Texas and California, the playbook starts now, building relationships with the journalists who will own the legalisation story before it breaks, establishing a visible presence in regulatory and community conversations, and publishing authoritative state-specific content today.”
The AI visibility angle makes this more urgent than it was even for Michigan in 2021. “Our recent AI Visibility Index found that AI queries about sports betting in Texas and California are already generating significant citation volume despite neither state being legal.”
The Gaming Trust Index arrives at a pivotal moment: stricter regulations, AI-driven discovery upending traditional search, and more investor scrutiny of ESG-related indicators. The $3.9 billion question is whether the industry’s leadership can change its approach to investing before those pressures culminate in something more expensive than a communications report.
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