Gambling.com Cuts Outlook as AI Restructuring Reshapes the Business

Gambling.com Group Ltd entered 2026 talking less about search rankings and more about artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, and workforce reduction.

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The company’s first-quarter numbers showed a business in transition. Revenue held flat at €40.4 million, but underneath that headline figure the mix changed sharply. Traditional marketing operations — long powered by search-engine traffic — weakened again, while the sports data segment kept expanding at a pace management increasingly portrayed as central to the company’s future.

Adjusted EBITDA dropped to €9 million from €15.9 million a year earlier, and the company lowered its full-year guidance to between €165 million and €170 million in revenue, alongside projected adjusted EBITDA of €45 million to €50 million.

A large part of the pressure came from the same problem that has rattled much of the affiliate and digital publishing industry over the past year: dependence on Google search traffic. Gambling.com said marketing revenue fell 5% year over year as SEO disruptions combined with regulatory changes in markets including the U.K. and Finland.

Executives described the deterioration in those regions as worse than initially expected. In the U.K., customer lifetime values declined while traffic volumes weakened at the same time. Finland added another layer of pressure through regulatory adjustments that affected revenue-sharing agreements.

A Business Moving Away From SEO Dependence

The response from management was unusually blunt. Rather than waiting for search trends to normalize, the company is accelerating a shift away from SEO-heavy acquisition models and restructuring the organization around AI-assisted workflows.

That restructuring will eliminate roughly a quarter of the workforce.

Management expects the move to save around €13 million annually once fully implemented, with about half of those savings expected to materialize during 2026. The restructuring itself is projected to cost approximately €2.5 million.

What stood out during the earnings call was how aggressively executives framed AI adoption not as experimentation, but as operational infrastructure already embedded inside the business. Incoming CEO Kevin McChrystal said around 80% of new code production is now AI-generated. The company also indicated AI tools are being used heavily across content production and product deployment.

The shift appears designed not only to reduce labor costs but also to speed up development cycles as the company pivots toward higher-margin enterprise products.

OpticOdds Expansion Becomes Central Growth Engine

That pivot is increasingly visible inside the numbers.

Sports Data Services revenue climbed 13% year over year to €11.2 million, accounting for 28% of total company revenue — the largest contribution from the segment so far. OpticOdds, the company’s odds and trading data platform, continued to expand internationally at a far faster pace than the legacy affiliate business.

Management disclosed that new OpticOdds deals nearly doubled from a year earlier, while international partnerships rose 178%. Active partners increased 24% sequentially, and most customers are now using API integrations rather than older odds-screen products.

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The company also appears eager to position itself inside the broader AI ecosystem rather than simply using AI internally.

Executives highlighted integrations with Anthropic’s Claude platform and a new partnership with Perplexity AI that will distribute sports odds data across Perplexity’s products before the end of the second quarter.

Those deals matter beyond branding. They suggest Gambling.com sees structured sports data as one of its more defensible assets at a time when generic search-driven publishing has become harder to monetize consistently.

The company also emphasized that non-SEO revenue exceeded SEO revenue for the second consecutive quarter, another signal that management is trying to reduce exposure to algorithm volatility.

North America offered one of the few brighter spots in the quarter. Management said marketing activity in the U.S. and Canada continued growing, supported partly by audience monetization tools and broader traffic diversification efforts. Depositing customers reportedly increased 60% from the previous quarter.

Still, profitability remains under pressure while the transition unfolds. Adjusted EBITDA margin contracted sharply to 22% from 39% a year ago, reflecting heavier spending on paid traffic acquisition and alternative distribution channels designed to compensate for weaker organic search performance.

Free cash flow also fell materially, declining to €3.9 million from €10.3 million in the prior-year quarter.

Leadership changes are arriving at the same moment as the restructuring. Co-founder Charles Gillespie is handing the CEO role to McChrystal in what the company described as a planned transition rather than a strategic reset. The broader direction appears largely set already: fewer employees, heavier automation, more enterprise data products, and less dependence on Google.

For now, investors are being asked to tolerate weaker margins and lower guidance while management attempts to rebuild the business around those assumptions. Whether the transition works may depend less on gambling demand itself and more on how successfully Gambling.com can turn AI from a cost-cutting tool into a durable competitive advantage.

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