Brazil's betting ban: what happens to keyword campaigns

If your app took real-money bets in Brazil, its Brazilian store page has been gone since October 6. This post covers what happened, what it does to keyword campaigns aimed at Brazil, and what to check before the budget moves somewhere else.

Heads up. This is the state of things on October 20, 2026. The measure is being challenged in court, and dates can move. None of this is legal advice.

What changed

On September 25, 2026, Brazil's government published provisional measure MP 1.394/2026. It bans offering, brokering, and advertising fixed-odds bets anywhere in the country, according to the Brazilian Senate's news agency. The ban covers bets on sports events and online games, so it reaches online casinos as well as sportsbooks.

The measure names app stores directly: stores and operating systems have to keep the banned products off their platforms. The timeline it set:

• October 6. Betting platforms had to go offline.
• October 25. All existing licenses and authorizations expire.
• Within 120 days. Congress has to vote for the measure to become permanent law.

Apple and Google complied on the first date. Yogonet reported that Globo tracked 15 betting apps operating legally in Brazil: all 15 were in the stores on Monday, October 5, and none were there on Tuesday morning.

The measure is not settled. Three lawsuits against it are with Brazil's Supreme Court, and the judge in charge will decide on an injunction after the second round of the elections, per Jurinews on October 19.

If your app takes real-money bets

There is no campaign to run in Brazil. An install needs a store page to land on, and the store page is gone. Pause every keyword aimed at Brazil, whatever it was set to deliver.

Keep the Brazilian keywords in your tracker, though. If the court suspends the measure and the apps come back, the chart shows the day your app reappears for each term and where it lands. That is the moment to decide whether to restart, and you will want to see it without checking the store by hand every morning.

If your app is free-play

After October 6, a search for bet or casino in Brazil returns simulated slot machines with no payouts, plus card games, according to the same Yogonet report. The apps that used to share those results with them are gone.

Limitation. The measure is written about fixed-odds betting. Whether your particular app falls under it depends on how it works and how Brazilian law reads it. We cannot answer that, and a store listing that is live today is not proof either way.

If you are confident the app is outside the ban, the Brazilian results for gambling terms have just been reshuffled. Two cautions before you spend on it:

• Our own data comes from a full market. In a casino campaign in Australia, 1,260 installs on pokies left the app between 200th and 216th place. A market whose leaders just left is a different situation, and we have no campaign data on it yet.
• Start on terms your app can hold. The lesson from that case still applies: low-volume terms in a narrow category move on far fewer installs than the big category word. Add the terms to the tracker first and see where the app already appears.

If the budget moves to another country

Before any keyword work, two checks.

Is your app allowed there? Apple's guideline 5.3.4 requires real-money gaming apps to hold licenses where they are used and to be geo-restricted to those places.

Google Play keeps a country list for gambling apps with the types of gambling allowed in each. Even Brazil is still on that list, for horse racing and for lotteries published by Caixa Econômica Federal.

Does the store show your app there at all? A new country starts with no install history for your app. If you search your main terms in that country's store and the app is missing from the results, a keyword campaign has nothing to move yet. That case calls for installs without a keyword first, with the terms already in the fields that store reads.

Once the app shows up for its terms, keyword campaigns can target them directly, starting with the low-volume ones.

Where Rankforge fits

What we can do depends on which of the three cases above is yours.

• Real-money betting in Brazil: only the tracker, for now. There is no store page to send installs to. The keyword tracker is free and needs no card, so the Brazilian terms stay on a chart and you see the day the app is back.
• Free-play apps in Brazil: keyword campaigns. Brazil is on our country list. On the App Store a campaign can run on live installs, made by people. On Google Play we run automated installs only, and those leave no ratings. Whether your app is outside the ban is the one question we cannot answer for you.
• A licensed app moving to a new country: indexation, then keywords. If the app does not show up there yet, start with installs without a keyword, then run keyword campaigns on the terms it appears for.

What to watch next

• The Supreme Court injunction. It decides whether the measure stays in force while the merits are argued.
• Congress. Without a vote within 120 days, a provisional measure lapses.
• The store results themselves. Search results can change before news of a ruling reaches you, and the tracker records the day your app reappears.

We will update this post when either of the first two happens.