Ask Google who will win the Senate on Tuesday and there’s a good chance the answer comes with a price attached. CasinoReviews.net, a gambling review site, checked 140 mobile Google results pages across 14 US cities on October 15 and 16. On the 112 pages for everyday forecast searches such as “election forecast” and “midterm polls,” Polymarket or Kalshi showed up on page one half the time.
The two platforms split the territory. Kalshi appeared on all 28 pages for “senate odds” and “midterm odds” but on only 6% of forecast pages, which leaves the forecast searches mostly to Polymarket. Searchers seem to treat both as polls anyway. “Polymarket polls” and “Kalshi polls” rank among the top related searches.
Most of the demand isn’t betting demand. About one in 120 midterm searches uses betting or odds language, and plain forecast searches outnumber those nearly nine to one. That’s the commercial point. Google is handing betting platforms the far larger audience of people who only want to know who’s ahead.
Free distribution where the product is banned
Eight of the 14 cities sit in states that ban betting on elections: Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Charlotte, Las Vegas and Chicago. The platforms appeared in all eight. Twenty-four states ban election betting outright, yet federally regulated prediction markets offer election contracts nationwide and argue that federal oversight overrides state gambling law. Whether it does is being fought in court. A voter in Chicago who sees a Kalshi price in a Google result is told none of that.
For investors in the space, this is the part worth pricing. The volume is already large. More than $1.4 billion had traded on midterm contracts by October 23, most of it on Kalshi. Search placement is customer acquisition that costs the platforms nothing, and it reaches people who would never download a betting app. Every cycle in which market odds sit next to polls in search results makes them look more like a news source and less like a wager. That’s the framing the platforms want in front of regulators and judges.
Are the prices any good?
That’s a separate question, and the record is mixed. Large studies across many contracts have found prediction market odds well calibrated. This cycle also brought misses in primaries where the markets’ favorites lost. Going into the final weekend, the markets put the Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate in the mid to high 60s, well above at least one major statistical model that has the race near a coin flip.
Tuesday is a clean test. If the markets beat the polls, the search placement looks earned. If they miss badly while sitting on page one in states that ban them, the court fight gets a new exhibit.