Google has banned hundreds of millions of gambling adverts for breaching its rules, with the tech giant stating that its safety teams have been ‘working round the clock’.
Despite its efforts, however, Google still finds itself in regulatory crosshairs regarding illegal gambling across multiple markets, alongside some of its fellow Big Tech players.
Alphabet’s IT and tech firm has been using its Gemini AI tool to detect what it calls ‘bad ads’ – advertisements displayed via the Google Ads platform which break its rules and standards.
In 2025, it blocked or removed 8.3 billion ads, equating to around one banned advert for every person on the planet (based on the April 2026 estimate from Worldmeter).
Gambling and games consisted the eighth largest category of all banned adverts, with over 270.7 million ads blocked or removed in 2025. The sector was also the third largest category for restricted ads at 123.9 million.
“Our teams have long used advanced AI to identify and stop scammers, and Gemini takes that work even further,” said Keerat Sharma, Google’s Vice President and General Manager of Ads Privacy and Safety.
“Our models analyse hundreds of billions of signals — including account age, behavioural cues and campaign patterns — to stop threats before they reach people.
“Unlike earlier keyword-based systems, our latest models better understand intent, helping us spot malicious content and preemptively block it, even when it’s designed to evade detection.”
Whose ads have been removed?…
Gambling advertising has become much more prominent on Google’s radar over the past year or so, a result of mounting public and political concerns about the visibility of betting content – for both legal and illegal platforms – across many markets.
Concerns have been raised in a diverse range of countries from the UK to Brazil, the Netherlands to Australia, and Google has had to respond. In January, the firm’s European branch, Google Ireland, announced that advertising policies would tighten from March 2026.
Google Ireland’s Google Ads team told relevant parties that accounts ‘that face repeated certification revocations or violations’ could see their certifications revoked, or future applications of Google Ads certifications rejected.
In its 2025 report, Google revealed extensive enforcement actions against publishers. A breakdown of public policy violations by page volume saw 9.7 million violations for gambling and games publishers, making it the fifth highest ranking sector.
Something that has not been made clear in the report, however, is the nature of these gambling platforms – namely, were operators being promoted licensed or unlicensed in the markets they were targeting via Google Ads?
This is quite an important question in the context of the demands being made of big tech firms by gambling regulators. The prevalence of unlicensed advertising on social media, for example, has been cited countless times in the UK over the past year, within the context of a heated debate around taxation and regulation.
In Brazil, meanwhile, the still-relatively-young ‘Bets’ market continues to battle against an extensive lingering black market, one that predated the creation of the legal market on 1 January 2025 by many decades.
On Saturday (18 April), the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP) sent letters to both Google Brazil and Apple requesting ‘clarifications about the availability of illegal betting applications’ in the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
These gambling apps were, according to the MJSP, unlicensed with the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA), Brazil’s betting regulator under the Ministry of Finance.
The apps were identified by monitoring carried out by the General Coordination of Rating Classification of the National Secretariat of Digital Rights (SEDIGI).
The MJSP has told Google and Apple to provide detailed explanations around internal policies, pre-screening procedures, and an updated list of all applications in the lotteries, betting and casino categories on each firm’s store.
The pressure is still on Big Tech firms like Google and Apple, as well as social media giants like Meta and X, to prevent the proliferation of online gambling. The use of influencers to promote illegal products has also been cited by regulators across many markets, including the UK and Brazil.
Nonetheless, when it comes to policing its Google Ads platform, the Californian tech giant is confident that its endeavours are paying off. It has particular faith in the Gemini AI system, with Google’s Sharma saying that Gemini has “dramatically improved our ability to detect and stop bad ads”.
“Our systems caught over 99% of policy-violating ads before they ever served, and we’re continuing to evolve our defenses to stay ahead of even the most advanced schemes,” Sharma asserted.