Gambling’s reach is extending deeper into the investment ecosystem as Google strikes a deal to pipe prediction market data from Kalshi Inc. and Polymarket into its finance platform.
In the partnership announced Thursday, Google Finance said it will offer up the changing odds from the prediction market exchanges when users ask for information about future events. Financial terms of the deal with the Alphabet Inc. unit weren’t disclosed.
Kalshi and Polymarket are getting the valuable imprimatur of Google as they seek to legitimize a product that has been derided, in some circles, as nothing more than gambling.
The exchanges have experienced record volumes, due in large part to the popularity of their sports betting products, which offer a federally regulated way to wager on the outcome of sports events of all sorts, despite significant legal pushback from state gaming regulators.
But the companies have been eager to present the trading on their exchanges as a better way to understand the probabilities around a wide array of global issues — from economic data to weather events.
Kalshi and Polymarket both hosted significant trading around the recent US elections, and the odds on the exchanges were cited by many news organizations, in part because they were updated in real time, unlike the more irregular results of polls.
Google said Thursday that the deal with allow its users to “harness the wisdom of the crowds.” As an example, it said that a user asking about future GDP growth will be offered the odds reflected on the exchanges.
Representatives for Kalshi and Polymarket declined to comment.
The integration marks another step in the merging of speculative and informational markets. Prediction data — once confined to niche crypto platforms — has increasingly been used by traders and analysts as an alternative signal for economic or political risk, even though volumes and liquidity have been patchy.
For Google, the move fits into a broader effort to enrich search results with probabilistic and real-time data, as artificial intelligence-powered tools offer new ways to forecast trends.
