Every operator sees its own deposits and registrations. Few can see the whole market at the same time: which brands players look for, whether total demand is growing, and how fast a competitor is gaining attention. Blask Index answers those questions with one number per brand and per country, updated hourly. It is the base metric of Blask, the iGaming market intelligence platform. Every other Blask brand metric starts from it. A brand index tracks search demand for one operator in one country. The market index is the sum of all tracked brands in that country, so it shows whether demand for online gambling as a whole is growing or shrinking. The index is built on the Share of Search method. Les Binet and James Hankins showed that a brand’s share of category searches tends to move ahead of its share of the market. A higher value means more measured demand. The number is an index, not a count. When Stake’s index in India went from 974K in February 2024 to 10.33M in April, demand for the brand grew about 10.6 times. It does not mean 10.33M people searched for Stake. The useful readings are relative: change over time, a brand against the market, one brand against another in the same country. Blask Index is not a count of people, visits or searches. It is not GGR, NGR, deposits or reported revenue, and it is not raw Google Trends data. The crypto casino Duel shows why this matters. According to on-chain data from Tanzanite, Duel took $1.66B in deposits in its first year, and 61% of that volume came from deposits between $10K and $1M. A few large depositors can move revenue a lot while generating little search. In Blask’s June 2026 comparison of leading crypto casinos, Duel ranked higher by deposits than by Blask Index. The calculation has four stages: collect search signals, filter them by intent, attach them to the right brand, and normalize the result. The processing and weights are proprietary, so the steps below describe the method rather than a formula. The full pipeline is in How Blask measures. Blask processes billions of geo-tagged search queries. It keeps queries like “brand_name betting” and removes queries like “brand_name scam” or “brand_name payout problems”. The result reflects intent to use a brand, not complaints or news about it. An automated scan finds candidate sites through local-language queries such as “online casino”. A computer-vision model checks homepages for signs of a real gambling product, a language model removes affiliates and review sites, and analysts confirm the list. In Brazil alone, the process mapped more than 500+ active brands. Spelling variants such as “merrybet” and “merry bet” then merge into one brand. Blask re-weights the cleaned volumes against total search activity in the country, which removes the effect of general growth in internet use. Google can revise its historical data, so Blask collects the same periods more than once and corrects for revisions. A seasonal adjustment accounts for regular yearly patterns. Brand indexes are calculated every hour, and their sum is the country’s Blask Index. Daily and monthly values are available for longer analysis. Game-level demand uses a separate monthly metric, Share of Interest, and should not be confused with the brand and market index. In 2026 Blask compared Italy’s Blask Index with a behavioural panel of Italian internet users, a source with no connection to search. From August to November 2025, weekly changes in the index and the panel’s iGaming reach correlated at r = 0.84 over 17 weeks (p < 0.001). The match has limits. From December 2025 to August 2026 the correlation fell to r = 0.26 over 38 weeks, which is not statistically significant. The strong result holds in autumn, when football moves both series. Read the index as a direction first and a level second. One day rarely tells you much. A month against the previous month, or against the same month a year earlier, tells you more. Blask expresses these comparisons as YoY and MoM growth. A rising market index means more people in the country search for gambling brands. The cause can be a sports season, a new brand, a large campaign or legalization. A rising brand index means more attention for the brand. It does not show by itself whether that attention turns into deposits. A falling index means less measured demand: the end of a season, a payment or regulatory change, or a brand losing visibility. When Brazil banned betting in September 2026, demand for licensed brands fell 87% within two weeks. In September 2026 the prediction market brand Novig released its “Just Sports” campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney. Its Blask Index in the US grew 21 times in two days, reaching 12.61K on 10 September. Year over year, Novig grew 1,980%, the fastest among US prediction markets. Even so, Novig’s BAP was 0.26%, sixth among prediction markets, against 71.46% for Polymarket and 25.55% for Kalshi. A spike shows attention. Whether it becomes growth shows in the level that remains weeks later, and in whether the brand’s share moves. Within one country, brand indexes share the same normalization and can be compared directly. Across countries, compare the direction and size of change. A 40% drop in two markets is comparable. Index values of 50M in two countries are not. Google Trends rescales every term to its own 0–100 range and reports spelling variants separately. Blask Index merges variants into one brand, removes negative-intent queries, sums all brands into a market total and corrects for Google’s later revisions. Traffic counts visits that already happened, including returning players, affiliates and bots. Blask Index measures the demand that comes before a visit. Share of Search is the method. Blask Index is the demand measure built on it. The share itself is Brand’s Accumulated Power (BAP): a brand’s Blask Index divided by the market’s. If a brand’s demand grows 20% while the market grows 50%, its index rises and its share falls. Search comes before…
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