Google blocked more than 270 million gambling-related advertisements in 2025, as part of a wider crackdown on policy violations across its ad ecosystem. Despite these efforts, the tech giant and its parent company Alphabet continues to face growing scrutiny from regulators worldwide over the spread of illegal gambling content online.
According to Google’s annual Ads Safety Report, the company eliminated a total of 8.3 billion ads last year roughly one for every person on Earth. Gambling and gaming ranked ninth among the most-removed categories, with 270.7 million ads taken down, and third among restricted categories, totaling 123.9 million ads.
There is increasing concern among the public as well as in government over the visibility of gambling, providing access to illegal gambling operators; therefore, Google is strengthening its policies on this topic. There have been several complaints made to Google regarding advertising for online gambling. Examples of these markets are the UK, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Australia.
In this year, Google Ireland made an announcement that stricter advertising policy violations will go into effect on March, 2026. Advertisers have repeatedly violated Google’s policies and have subsequently lost their Google Certifications; therefore, they are at risk of being banned from using the Google platform permanently.
The report that was released, including the most recent complaint, mentioned that a total of 9,700,000 gambling-related publishers had violated Google’s advertising policies; therefore, Google’s gambling publisher category played fifth overall. However, Google did not identify how many of these violations were committed by licensed versus unlicensed gambling operators, nor did it disclose whether these violations occurred in countries with restrictions on doing so.
Many regulators are concerned about the lack of assurance regarding the number of gambling-related violations that occurred through Google or other social media platforms. Thus far, regulators have called on Google to provide greater accountability for its violations and for illegal gambling promotions on major platforms (for example, Meta or X).
Google states that they have improved their ability to detect violations significantly since introducing the Gemini AI system, however, regulators across various jurisdictions continue to call for greater transparency and stricter enforcement as the online gambling industry evolves.
