As the influence of artificial intelligence continues to deepen across the gambling industry, Marlin Media has set itself a significant ambition regarding its conversational, vertical casino search engine.
marvn.ai officially debuted in November 2025 in what was labelled as a major milestone amid a focus on delivering a faster and more accurate, reliable and private way for players to discover casinos and bonuses online.
In conversation with iGaming Expert, CEO, Ionut Constantinescu, delves into the shifting search habits of players, what this means for the future and why AI is certain to be a major factor in what lies ahead.
Will AI be the fastest adopted technology of all time?
It’s certainly not lost on anyone that the influence of AI is soaring to ever greater heights. Subsequently, this has had a profound effect on how users’ search habits and behaviors are continuing to evolve.
As technological progress advances this expected shift at an unexpected pace, Constantinescu points to the near one billion users of ChatGPT as evidence that we are beyond the precipice of a tipping point.
“I think that the adoption of this technology will be one of the fastest that people have seen,” he says. “Social media didn’t grow that fast.
“You also have to look at search habits, and if you do you have to look at what Google has been doing recently as they’re still the main search engine.
“Google launched AI overviews, which can only reflect the common trend. If they launch something it’s because they know it will work and they want to really push forward.”
However, this does not paint the full picture, Constantinescu notes. The fact that AI overviews have overtaken traditional search results means that people prefer these replies, with the pattern of behaviour from consumers following that up.
“I don’t know if it was needed or we’re being pushed towards it, but I think that search as we know it has gone through some tremendous changes in the last 12 months,” he comments.
“In one year, maybe we’re going to have the default mode as AI, where you basically converse with the tool.”
Are we witnessing the end of traditional SEO-driven affiliation?
The drop off is quite substantial, and, as Constantinescu continues, if you’ve been following not just iGaming but big affiliates over the last 12 months, the impact of AI Overviews, which is arguably the new way of serving results, has been quite substantial.
Despite this, it is acknowledged that some point to a potential crisis. Sear Interactive tracked 53 brands across 2.43 billion impressions over 14 months, and found that organic click-through rates on queries where an AI Overview appears fell from 3.19% to a floor of 1.31% – a 59% decline across 2025.
“If you look in our own backyard, a lot of the traditional affiliate sites are struggling,” Constantinescu explains. “I don’t think it’s a matter of trust or credibility, but it’s fuelled by this push towards vertical generative answer engines and not search engines.
“I also think that users are getting used to that kind of answer. For example, Booking.com doesn’t show you a directory of hotels – it matches your dates, budget, and preferences to available inventory. It’s only a matter of time that players will start expecting the same kind of answers for their casino searches.
“I don’t think it’s a problem of trust, although traditionally our industry wasn’t very successful in creating trust.”
Moving on, the Marlin Media CEO cites a quote made by former Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, which states that ‘AI absorbs the average’.
This basically translates to meaning that if you create average content, your chances of being replaced by an AI or generative answer is probably going to be 100%.
Constantinescu adds: “There’s going to be more trouble, but it’s partially because of the way that search works now. If we do not change how we create content in this industry, it’s going to be very hard to stay there.”
A structural shift and a massive impact
The impact of how players discover casinos amid a continued rise of AI is certainly not marginal, Constantinescu says. This structurally significant shift is sure to have huge repercussions across the industry.
As players continue to not only get used to this technology but prefer it in a lot of instances, the potential issues are sure to increase as daily lives are made much easier overall.
“I think the problem for our industry concerns the money making queries, or the revenue generating queries,” he says.
“The ones that bring the highest revenue are comparative and informational, best of type of queries are the ones that are going to be most impacted by this new type of generative result.”
This point is supported by two specific examples, he reinforces, one of which saw research and advisory firm Gartner predict that search traffic will decrease by a quarter purely because people will not go through traditional means.
Furthermore, a ChatGPT integration in the U.S. alongside Walmart reportedly saw such an increase in 12 months that 20% of referral traffic now comes from the chatbot.
“The shift is there, and it’s only going to accelerate, because it’s going to get better and better,” Constantinescu remarks.
“If they’re getting better, people will be more happy with them. You don’t see a lot of people saying, ‘oh, this is nonsense, this is an hallucination’. The impact, particularly in our industry, is going to be massive.”
marvn – going beyond the average
If you build something generalistic that tries to do everything there’s things that will fall through the cracks. This was the response when pressed on a prior statement that ‘many widely used AI models still lack the specialist knowledge and real-time data required’.
The AI-powered engine was built to counter these particular issues, with it stated that the sheer volume of data being absorbed in order to feed these answers means that ChatGPT and Google would find it very hard to get their hands on.
“We try to fill in that gap, and there’s a lot of gaps in there,” he explains. “Until we get to a point where we have the end goal, which is general artificial intelligence that can go and register, create an account and everything like a human being, there’s still a lot for things that general answer engines won’t have.
“marvn is built to just niche down to the industry where we speak to affiliate managers, make sure we get to the right information, add the correct bonus terms.
“It’s insane how much data is there that you can’t just find through generalised search. That’s where we come in.
Casino search is undoubtedly within a tremendous transformation point, whether we like or want it or not. The shift being witnessed simply cannot be avoided.
It is with this in mind that marvn was born. It does not return a plain list of links. It returns a synthesized answer to a question based on hundreds of thousands of data points.
Constantinescu concludes: “What makes it different is that we have access to things that Google does not have. Our end goal is to be the niche AI mode for the iGaming vertical.
“We’ve added a lot of slots and casinos. We’re mapping out the important sources. We can fact check information, plus we are constantly building our database, which is the backbone of it.
“As people are shifting towards AI and generative search, we wanted to have a place where that is happening. That’s the end goal, to be the answer engine for the iGaming industry.”
