Why Gambling Addiction Searches Keep Climbing Every Year

Five years ago, few people searched Google for “sports betting addiction.” The phrase barely registered in the data. Since then, Google searches for “sports betting addiction” have steadily increased, coinciding with an industry that has gone from a Nevada-only novelty to something built into nearly every broadcast, app, and stadium in the US.

We pulled five years of Google Trends data across 10 gambling-related search terms to see how search behavior around gambling help has moved as legal betting evolved and became part of everyday sports culture. Here’s what the data shows.

Searches for Help Are Up Across the Board

Every help-seeking term we tracked increased over the five-year period. “Gambling hotline” saw the biggest jump, up 357% in relative search interest from 2020 to 2025. “Gambling help” rose 191%. “Gambling disorder” and “problem gambling” rose 135% and 106%, respectively.

Google Trends scores are a relative index from 0 to 100, not a raw search count, so you can’t compare one term’s score directly to another’s. What you can compare is how each individual term moved over time, and every one of the above saw sizable increases.

Not all of them moved up equally, though. Terms that indicate someone is looking for a next step, hotline, help, or treatment, grew by 173% on average. Terms that just name the problem (addiction, disorder, problem gambling, compulsive gambling) grew by 86% on average. 

Also, “am I addicted to gambling,” the one truly unsure, self-questioning phrase we tracked, barely moved at all over five years. People aren’t lingering on the question. They’re going straight to language about getting help.

A Search Term That Didn’t Exist in 2020

The clearest signal in the data is “sports betting addiction.” It shows a flat 0 for 2020 and 2021, then appears for the first time in 2022 and climbs to an index average of 14.8 by 2025.

That timing lines up with the growth of mobile sports betting in the US. The term wasn’t being searched at meaningful volume in most states before people could bet from their phones.

Break it down by state and the pattern holds. By 2025, “sports betting addiction” only registered in states with legal online or mobile sports betting: Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. States without mobile wagering showed a flat 0 through the entire period.

How Gambling Became Impossible to Avoid

It’s worth stepping back to look at how the phrase “sports betting addiction” came into existence in 2022. Today, sports betting has moved beyond questions of legality in most states – it’s structurally embedded in how sports get broadcast, sponsored, and talked about.

Before 2018, every major US sports league officially opposed legal sports betting. The NHL was the first to reverse course, signing a sports betting partnership with MGM in October 2018, months after the Supreme Court’s Murphy v. NCAA decision struck down the federal ban. The NFL, historically the most resistant league, held out until 2021 before signing partnerships with Caesars, DraftKings, and FanDuel worth close to a billion dollars. Today, all four major US leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) have official sportsbook partners, and betting lines are a routine part of broadcast graphics rather than a novelty.

ESPN went a step further in 2023. The US’ preeminent sports broadcaster launched its own sportsbook, ESPN Bet, through a 10-year deal with Penn Entertainment reportedly worth around $1.5 billion in cash plus stock warrants. Penn and ESPN mutually ended the partnership in late 2025, but ESPN has since signed on with DraftKings as its new exclusive sportsbook and odds partner.

Sportsbooks have also signed some of the most recognizable names in sports as spokespeople, including Peyton Manning and Drew Brees, putting a familiar, trusted face on an industry that used to be associated with backroom bookies.

Interestingly, the raw volume of sports betting TV commercials has been in decline since 2021, down 27% by 2025 according to Nielsen data commissioned by the American Gaming Association. What hasn’t declined is how embedded betting content is in the sports-watching experience itself: league data partnerships, on-screen odds, and dedicated betting broadcasts are now permanent fixtures, even as the raw ad count has come down. 

Academic research on live on-screen betting odds during televised sport has found a link between embedded promotion and increased problem gambling risk. While this doesn’t explicitly implicate broadcast exposure as the sole source of the rise in help-seeking searches, it does provide a backdrop for why search behavior around gambling addiction keeps climbing at a national level, even in places where the underlying legal market itself isn’t necessarily expanding. 

Which States Are Searching for Help the Most

Some states show a much sharper rise in help-seeking searches than others. Mississippi, Missouri, Kansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma posted the largest jumps in “gambling hotline” search interest between 2020 and 2025, each gaining 17 to 21 points on the index. None of these five states have legal mobile sports betting, so the increase can’t be explained by a new sports betting product entering the market the way it can in states like Florida or New Jersey.

There’s a real, verifiable explanation available for Oklahoma. The state has no commercial casinos at all, with its entire gambling industry instead running through more than 130 tribal casinos that generate in excess of $5 billion a year. Oklahoma operates largely outside the commercial industry, on which most reporting coverage relies. That’s a visibility gap, not a small market: Oklahoma’s gambling footprint is likely far bigger than it appears in most public data, which is a plausible driver of rising hotline searches. 

Mississippi and Louisiana point to a different explanation: market age. Both states legalized riverboat casino gambling in the early 1990s, more than two decades before the current sports betting boom. There was no recent “grand debut” or wave of new ads or app launches, the way there was in states that only legalized mobile betting in the last few years. A rise in help-seeking there is more consistent with decades of accumulated access and normalization finally showing up in the data.

Kansas doesn’t fit either pattern as cleanly, and that’s a fair caveat. What’s clear is that at least part of this pattern reflects how visible and how old a state’s relationship with gambling is, not just whether a new product recently launched.

Every state that shows up in the numbers below also has access to national or regional responsible gambling tools and resources, including hotlines, self-exclusion programs, and deposit limits offered directly through licensed operators.

The Full State-by-State Data

Here’s the complete picture for all 38 states with commercial gambling data available, showing their “gambling addiction” and “gambling hotline” search figures for 2020 and 2025.

† Low search volume state, per Google’s own flagging; scores for these states may be unreliable.

What the Data Doesn’t Tell You

State-level scores for the broad term “gambling addiction” get noisy in smaller states, where low overall search volume can inflate scores in a given year. We excluded those states from any comparison rather than report numbers that don’t hold up. The advertising and league-partnership figures cited previously come from separate industry reporting (Nielsen/AGA advertising data and sports business coverage), not from the Google Trends dataset, and are included as context rather than as part of the search analysis.

This lines up with outside research: a 2025 JAMA Internal Medicine study (Yeola et al.) found a 23% national increase in gambling addiction help-seeking searches after the 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, with state increases ranging from 30% to 67%, including Massachusetts (47%), New Jersey (34%), New York (37%), and Pennsylvania (50%).

If You’re Looking for Help

The National Council on Problem Gambling operates the National Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-800-MY-RESET, with call, text, and chat support available 24/7 at ncpgambling.org. The older number, 1-800-522-4700, also still connects to the helpline.

Each state with legal sports betting also funds its own problem gambling resources, usually linked from the state gaming commission’s website.