Three reputable sport news websites – She Kicks, Football Blog and Sportscasting – have introduced AI-generated reporters whose reports are strewn with errors and fabrications.
All three sites were bought by digital marketing outfit Clickout Media in recent months, a business which has a history of buying once-viable websites to harvest their good reputations with Google to market online casinos (whilst replacing human writers with AI avatars).
Previously, these three football brands employed multiple human journalists. She Kicks is the website for Britain’s oldest women’s football magazine, which has been published since 1996, with the website live since 2001. Football Blog has been published since 2004.
New reporters have steadily appeared on She Kicks, such as Isabella Torres, producing AI-written versions of articles which have previously appeared elsewhere online.
A recent report on this year’s Women’s FA Cup Final pitting Manchester City against Brighton (published, then rapidly taken down, but screenshotted by Press Gazette) is riddled with basic errors.
The report got the score wrong (2-0, whereas in fact it was 4-0), with the goalscorers and descriptions of the goals also incorrect.
There were also multiple players described as playing who are either not in the teams or who had already left.
The site also refers to manager Gareth Taylor, who actually left Manchester City last year and now manages Liverpool.
Quotes attributed to Taylor also appeared to be made up, appearing online only in She Kicks and OneFootball (which reprinted the initial She Kicks report).
Another recent report on She Kicks said that the Liverpool women’s team manager is Matt Beard, whereas Beard actually left the club last year and died last September, and was riddled with other basic errors.
Other articles on the football websites taken over by Clickout Media contain fabricated quotes.
For example, a recent Sportscasting article, based on an interview England footballer Declan Rice gave to British Vogue, includes the quotes: “Even the older generation, the lads who have been here for a long time, get on so well with the younger boys coming through. There are no cliques, it’s just one big group ….”
“Everyone is laughing, everyone is talking. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 caps or zero; you’re treated the same.”
These quotes do not appear in the original British Vogue article by Olivia Marks, and appear nowhere else online except in Sportscasting.
The article comes up as 100% AI-generated in the AI checker Pangram.
On Football Blog, an article about a warning delivered by Tottenham manager Roberto De Zerbi features an AI-generated image of Zerbi, and looks completely different to the real press conference discussed in the article.
The article is flagged as 100% AI-generated on checking service Pangram.
Authors appear to be AI-generated
Byline pictures of authors Isabella Torres on She Kicks, Steve Adams on Football Blog and Matthew Bancroft on sportscasting are all AI-generated, according to checking service Identifai.
All three have very little profile online bar their byline pages on the three sports sites.
Each of the writers is hugely prolific, producing multiple articles per day along with articles themed around sports betting and casinos.
Press Gazette has spoken to former employees on condition of anonymity who describe a chaotic working culture and layoffs in favour of AI.
Clickout Media’s turnover was £40 million in 2024, the last year for which data was available, although the company declared a loss of £3 million and thus paid no tax.
The company’s modus operandi appears to be to buy reputable websites, replace reporters with AI to cut costs and fill the sites with lucrative casino and betting content. Press Gazette understands it may have done this to hundreds of websites.
Google takes a dim view of the practice, so sites are often penalised (including by being de-indexed, where they no longer appear in results) at which point Clickout simply abandons the site.
But on one gaming site bought by Clickout, EsportsInsider, Google penalised the site, but Clickout appealed the penalty.
The site now ranks number one in Google search resuts for the term “non-gamstop casino” in the UK (Gamstop is a service designed to stop problem gamblers accessing online sites).
The site attracts 418,000 visits per month, according to estimates from Ahrefs.
Clickout Media’s Kristoffer Holten explained the business model on a podcast recorded in 2023: “The casinos are struggling to get players themselves and they’re all competing. So they want to pay individuals like us to get them as many players as possible.
“And the higher the value, the better. So basically it is sending players to the casinos, to the operators, and you get either a fixed fee, a revenue share, a flat fee for even showing them just a banner or something. And that’s the name of the game. And the more traffic you bring, the more money you’ll make.”
Press Gazette contacted Clickout Media and its executives in advance of publication but has heard nothing in response.
Holten said that SEO organisations such as Clickout can take up to 35% of the money gamblers lose, and explains that Clickout plunges some of their profits into buying new sites.
Holten said: “Well, obviously there is a parasite part of it. We have the money to invest in parasites. Then we buy up sites. We buy new sites. That’s really lucrative for us, buying up large new sites all the way up to a few million dollars per acquisition, transforming those into casino sites and crypto sites. We’re really successful at that. And that’s obviously something that we’re not the only ones that do this. Every single gambling firm out there does this, but we’re just quicker at doing the transaction, actually bringing money on the table.”
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