Gambling ads come out well in UK watchdog’s monitoring of age rule
The ASA found just one confirmed breach of the rule during five months of monitoring.
UK.- The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has released its latest compliance report covering the period from July to November 2025. The update suggests that licensed gambling operators are doing well in terms of complying with a rule to avoid using people aged under 25 in advertising.
The five-month review employed the ASA’s new AI-driven Active Ad Monitoring system, which captured approximately 13,000 unique paid-for and organic advertisements across the gambling and alcohol sectors.
Only one confirmed breach was found among gambling, representing 0.4 per cent of the adverts monitored. A further 3.4 per cent were flagged as potential breaches, while 96.2 per cent were deemed fully compliant.
That compares with 86.7 per cent of ads that were deemed compliant in the alcohol sector, where 10.8 per cent were flagged as possible breaches and 2.5 per cent confirmed to have breached the rule.
“Our findings indicate that a small percentage of online alcohol and gambling ads feature a person who is or clearly appears to be under the age of 25, in clear breach of the advertising rules,” the ASA concluded.
“They also identified some areas of greater risk. In particular, organic ads that share user-generated content on social media have a higher risk of being problematic. Alcohol ads were also more likely to be flagged as high risk than gambling ads.”
The self-regulatory body said it had “secured assurances” from advertisers identified as running non-compliant ads.
