Moving beyond SEO and buying Spotlight.Vegas, with Gambling.com Group CEO Charles Gillespie

Gambling.com Group built its business on organic search and now says it is spreading further. In this Stocktwits executive interview, recorded after record second-quarter results, CEO Charles Gillespie tells host Katie Perry how the group is diversifying, how he reads the effect of AI on search, and why it is buying Spotlight.Vegas.

In this episode

• Gillespie says sports data hit 25 percent of group revenue, with OpticOdds up 120 percent year on year, and the marketing arm posted a record second quarter (1:30, 2:02).

• The company has spent about a year putting more into paid media, social media, communities and brand building, because it wants to take its experience beyond natural search (2:02, 2:30, 3:00).

• He argues people overreacted to LLMs: high-intent commercial queries are proportionately less affected, and users still want slot demos and videos that chatbots cannot provide (4:00, 4:32, 5:30).

• As an affiliate the company refers players, gets paid and is then out of the loop; Spotlight.Vegas, closing on 1 September, lets it control the whole ticket-buying journey (8:01, 8:30, 9:01).

• He expects prediction markets to grow this NFL season, and says same game parlays are popular with players and high margin for operators (12:00, 12:30).

• He says the group is building AI bots and tools that use OpticOdds and OddsJam data to help users build and find bets, but will not give the data away free (13:02, 14:00).

Interview from Stocktwits, published on YouTube.