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Google News has started showing Polymarket bets alongside actual news articles, often appearing as large blocks that contain links to numerous gambling opportunities on the service.
The bets often appear in the “For you” section of Google News, which is tailored to a user’s personal interests. In one instance, it was even the very top result, as with this bet on the price of Bitcoin.
In our testing, Polymarket bets are also showing up on the Google News home page.
But links from the prediction market can pop up all over Google News, including in searches. In further tests, looking up “will ships transit the strait,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz, returned numerous credible sources like Financial Times, The Guardian, and Reuters. Just below them, however, was a Polymarket bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical oil passageway.
This doesn’t appear to be an accident. When searching “Polymarket” in its search bar, Google News now allows users to choose it as a “source,” directing them to a page that aggregates other Polymarket hits. It’s not the only non-news site that’s selectable as a source — looking up “Reddit” and “X” offers the option, too — but searching for “Kalshi,” another prediction market and Polymarket’s main competitor, doesn’t give the option to use it as a source.
It’s unclear when Polymarket bets began crowding Google News, but it appears to be a recent development. A handful of complaints on social media go back to around the same date in late March. Polymarket bets will also appear in the News section of a Google search, and at least one post reporting this goes back to January.
Google did not respond to questions by press time. In November, the search giant announced a deal with Polymarket and Kalshi to feed their prediction data into its finance platform; it’s unclear if Polymarket’s inclusion in Google News has anything to do with that partnership.
Regardless, it’s easy to see why Polymarket would be catnip to Google’s algorithms, since it generates huge numbers of pages for bets that are constantly updated in small ways, making them seem — on a surface level — like valuable news stories. The reality, though, is that Polymarket has been criticized for dealing in the language of journalism while peddling wildly irresponsible falsehoods.
Prediction markets allow users to bet on a wide range of real world outcomes, including geopolitical developments with seismic implications. They affix a percentage likelihood to each event, which is calculated based on user bets. As such, they present themselves as offering a unique analytic power, drawing on the wisdom of the crowd to sound out the future.
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