Online Gambling Surge Highlights Data Gaps in Harm Research

25 September 2026

The number of searches for help with gambling addiction spiked by 23% after a Supreme Court decision made way for online sportsbooks in 38 states, peaking at 180,000 monthly queries in 2023. Yet researchers warn that a key data gap is hindering efforts to track problem gambling and measure the effects of this rapid industry expansion.

As online gambling has transformed from a niche hobby to a mainstream pastime, the research community has flagged persistent gaps in the data it needs to fully understand the scope and impact of this trend. At issue is an ongoing lack of behavioral data from the platforms themselves, difficulty in consistent measurement, and relatively limited research on everything from the most at-risk demographics to the long-term health implications for those with problem gambling habits.

Searches for gambling addiction surged in every state, though highest in areas with the greatest adoption of online sports betting, a factor some researchers cite as evidence that the growth of these betting sites is paralleling rising rates of problem gambling behavior.

Spotty and Silver-Lined Evidence

Helpline searches are just one proxy for problem gambling rates, and a controversial one at that. Even as they rise, careful researchers are warning against overinterpretation. Indeed, an inability to consistently measure key variables—not to mention a lack of behavioral data from the online gambling sites themselves—is part of the problem.

And in truth, researchers have offered many such warnings in recent years as they point to prominent gaps in gambling-addiction research at large. A 2020 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, for instance, identified 116 articles on emerging gambling technologies and called for improved outcome measures, more work on subpopulations, and qualitative and longitudinal studies. A 2025 review of dark patterns in online gambling linked the same trends and noted that key evidence is largely found in gray literature, which is rarely peer-reviewed or subject to the rigor that similar work in more-studied areas might be.

The literature points to a field that is hamstrung not only by data access, but also by a host of other methodological challenges such as inconsistent terminology, and an inability to connect specific gambling behaviors to specific outcomes. Relatively few studies rely on longitudinal data, for instance, making it difficult for many studies to track the effects of online gambling over long periods of time. Indeed, much of the existing research is observational, while the research range is unevenly covered between jurisdictions for aISSUE and subject. Add together online and offline betting, for instance, and gambling addiction will vary widely across nations and across age groups.

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Only in recent years has the research corpus completed its pivot to online platforms, propelled by a proliferation of sites and the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated adoption online.

Rising to the Challenge

Little is known about how to identify problem gamblers, or to help those who might be suffering. A 2026 review in Frontiers in Public Health found that referral and treatment pathways are both limited and fragmented, with inconsistent treatment and poor coordination between services. Just 39 studies covered found that referrals were largely self-initiated, with declining treatment engagement, and limited coordination between those treating patient at the helm.

Harms are global, however. A 2025 paper in npj Digital Medicine says gambling harm is a public health issue and notes increasing use of large datasets such as operator data, banking transaction data, helpline data, and geospatial data in gambling-harm research. Yet both these datasets and the use of linked routinely collected data remains limited to study a population that is still expanding rapidly. Online sports wagers alone rose by some 2,400% from 2017 to 2023.

The problem is not one of data access, however. Indeed, the platforms are not holding back. For those with the time and resources, behavioral data, like a look behind the curtain, is available to researchers. This data, however, is cumbersome to interlink with health records and the physiology of harm. The 2025 paper concludes that further investigation is needed to understand how linkage methods affect both data reliability and generalizability. .

Well over 10% of Americans have gambled online, and nearly 7.5 million of them have searched for help with gambling addiction in the last five years. In the shadow of this growth, the need for researchers is clear: to survey the emergence of this $121 billion industry, to meet the complex intricacies of its spread, and to guide best practices in an area that is becoming increasingly systemic to the exponential growth of online gambling and the diffusion of harm.