March Madness is nearly here, and the American Gaming Association expects Americans to wager $3.3 billion on the men’s and women’s tournaments. The first round of the college basketball postseason tips off on Thursday.
We used the Evertune platform to ask questions that mimic what would-be March Madness bettors ask and examined more than 10,000 responses across five large-language models (LLMs) to see where AI recommends placing these bets.
DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM were frontrunners on every model, based on the percentage of responses that include those brands. Outside of the top three, however, there were noticeable divisions, like Perplexity’s affinity for BetRivers and ChatGPT’s preference for Fanatics.
Half of our questions asked AI about “sportsbooks” and half asked about “apps” to compensate for any bias those terms might introduce; ultimately, this distinction did not introduce much variation in our results. You can filter by overall visibility or view visibility within “App” or “Sportsbook” in the chart below.
March Madness’s Visible Five
The average visibility dropped off significantly outside of the top five brands. That makes sense given that models included 4.2-5.5 brands per response on average in our sample, highlighting the importance of being one of the five most visible brands for AI search in this category.
It is worth noting that just because a brand was mentioned consistently doesn’t mean that its location in responses was consistent. While marketers would love for their brand to be AI’s first thought in every response, in reality brands’ orders in responses are highly variable.
DraftKings, for example, had the highest average overall visibility across models for our pool of prompts, but it was the first brand mentioned in only 26-30% of responses, depending on the model. Similarly on Gemini, DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM all had high visibility (96-98.8%), and each of the three was the first brand mentioned in about 1-in-4 responses.
| Brand | ChatGPT | Copilot | Gemini | Google AI Mode | Perplexity |
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What Bettors Ask and How
LLMs are probabilistic models that return different responses each time they’re prompted, even if the prompts are the same, which is why it is important to generate a meaningful sample of responses per prompt. Furthermore, even slight deviations in prompts can significantly alter the responses models return, making it important to stay on top of trending topics in AI search.
We saw this dichotomy firsthand in our March Madness prompting. In responses to questions that included the phrase “sign-up bonus” or “sign-up offers”, AI search visibility for Caesars, bet365 and Fanatics was noticeably higher than their overall average visibility. The phrase “odds boosts” had less effect on visibility, but Caesars was a clear winner and Fanatics a clear loser.
These are the kind of “perception gaps” brands target in their Generative-Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies to ensure they have high AI search visibility for the kinds of prompts their potential customers are likely to ask.
Perception gaps could also be to blame for the poor showing of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, which tend to use terms like “trading outcome” and “futures contract” instead of “bet.”
Methodology
At Evertune Research we track hundreds of brands across 250 categories. For this analysis, we ran custom prompts that mimic the types of prompts people ask about where to bet on the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. We ran our prompts on ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, repeating each prompt for statistically meaningful samples.
Evertune is the AI marketing platform for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) that helps brands improve visibility in AI search by analyzing responses at scale and delivering actionable insights. Evertune works with leading brands across all verticals, including Finance, Retail and E-Commerce, Automotive, Pharma, Tech, Travel, Food and Beverage, Entertainment, CPG, and B2B. Founded by early team members of The Trade Desk, Evertune has raised $20M in funding from leading adtech and martech investors. Headquartered in New York City, the company has a growing team of more than 40 employees.
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