TL;DR

Journalists at sites run by Clickout Media, a UK-based company Press Gazette describes as a parasite SEO operation, have lost their jobs, in what is believed to be the fallout from Google penalties against the sites, and AI-written articles have since appeared under former staff names. Press Gazette reported the findings on 26 October.

How the model works

Clickout buys established publications, paying up to a reported £14m for Gambling Insider, and uses their standing in Google search to push links to online casinos. Press Gazette reports that SEO affiliates can take up to half of what referred gamblers lose. In the endgame Press Gazette describes, Google hands out a manual penalty, the sites lose their search value and their newsrooms are cut.

Gambling Insider was penalised in September, and staff describe teams being gutted. At Esports Insider, a British-based site, the names of five or more journalists seem to have given way to a shared byline, ESI Editorial Team. Press Gazette says articles under that byline score as fully AI-generated on the Pangram detector. Clickout told Press Gazette it does not own Esports Insider, although several employees said the company ran it.

A byline revived

The sharpest case concerns Ben Touati, made redundant by Esports Insider in March. After Press Gazette’s earlier reporting, 28 new casino articles appeared under his name on the site’s German pages, each showing a last update in the window from 15 May to 14 July. “I never wrote or touched any of it, and couldn’t have,” Touati said, noting that Clickout had removed his access on 9 March.

Insiders told Press Gazette that Clickout may have bought as many as 300 websites. Accounts for its British trading company show turnover of just under £2m for the year ending September 2025, against £40m the year before, and a £1.7m loss.

Context

Google’s manual penalties are imposed by human reviewers for abuses such as using a site’s reputation to rank unrelated content, and they can be appealed. Clickout appears to have kept buying gaming domains after the penalties landed.

Looking Forward

In our view, the byline issue is the part UK publishers and regulators should note. Putting AI-written copy under a real person’s name, after that person has left, misleads readers about who wrote it and trades on the journalist’s reputation. As AI makes it cheap to keep an abandoned site looking staffed, the question of who stands behind a byline is likely to sharpen.