New research has discovered that people in European countries searching for gambling-related terms in Arabic spiked significantly during July and August 2015.

The research took 115 gambling search terms in Arabic – including ‘casino’, ‘roulette’, ‘poker’, ‘blackjack’, ‘betting’ – and examined their popularity over a two-year period, using actual search volume data from Google.

Source: Google keyword planner search volumes Sep ’13 – Aug ‘15

Over the preceding twenty-month period from September 2013 to May 2015, people entering gambling-related terms in Arabic remained steady, averaging 1,080 monthly searches. However, between June and August 2015, average monthly Arabic searches in European countries jumped from the previous average of 1,080, to 1,720 in August, which represents a 59 percent increase.

Gambling searches also increased the sharpest amongst mobile users. The twenty months prior to June 2015 averaged 484 searches each month on mobile for ‘poker’, ‘casinos’ and other gambling-related terms, but rose 155 percent to an all-time high of 1,232 in August.

To put this into perspective, between March and May the average number of searches on mobile was around 58 percent of the total, whereas in August this had jumped to 72 percent of the total search volume.

The most popular searches are related to ‘casinos’, which in August 2015 accounted for almost three times as many gambling queries as the second most searched term: ‘roulette’. Largely speaking, the Arabic search trends focused on seven themes, whose monthly search volumes increased in August 2015 as follows:

Source: Google keyword planner search volumes Sep ’13 – Aug ‘15