Several journalists have been made redundant across sites owned by parasite SEO company Clickout Media – and former staff are finding AI-written articles appear under their bylines.
The redundancies at sites including Gambling Insider and Esports Insider are believed to be in the wake of manual Google penalties against the sites, meaning they appear lower in search results.
The UK-based SEO company Clickout Media buys journalistic outlets (for up to a reported £14m in the case of Gambling Insider) and uses their reputation in Google search to boost links for online casinos.
Driving traffic to online casinos is enormously profitable, with SEO experts receiving a percentage (up to 50%) of everything gamblers lose.
The endgame of this strategy, known as parasite SEO, is that the sites are penalised, thus losing their value for boosting casino content, and journalists are fired, with the sites left as empty husks.
Clickout also often replaces journalists with AI bots or blank profiles, using AI to generate articles to create the impression that sites are still real outlets – all with the goal of boosting casino links.
Journalists on Gambling Insider have described teams being gutted and multiple journalists being laid off after the site was penalised by Google in September.
On the British-based site Esports Insider, multiple writers appear to have lost their jobs or freelance positions in recent weeks.
In correspondence with Press Gazette, Clickout Media claimed not to own Esports Insider, although multiple employees told us they ran the site, and online posts link Esports Insider to Clickout Media and its legal entity Finixo.
Employees told Press Gazette that people abruptly disappeared from company Slack channels – including many staff writers who were previously laid off and brought back on freelance contracts.
At least five journalists appear to have disappeared from the site and been replaced by a byline saying: ‘ESI Editorial Team’.
The articles produced under the shared byline score 100% AI-generated according to the AI detector Pangram.
The byline for ‘The Editorial Team’ states: “The Editorial Team delivers in-depth coverage of the esports industry… The newsroom also uses automation, data tools, and emerging reporting technologies to support research, monitoring, verification, and faster coverage of developing stories.”
On Gambling Insider, promotional articles directing readers to casinos and betting sites also seem to be written with AI, either being 100% AI-written or with a human-written intro and AI body text.
The Clickout-owned sites which were hit with manual penalties are believed to include other gaming-related publishing sites such as gamingamerica.com, playsense.nl, casinobeats.com and gamingamerica.com.
Following Press Gazette’s previous reporting, Clickout Media resurrected the Esports Insider site briefly and 28 new articles appeared under Ben Touati’s byline.
Touati previously saw multiple AI-written articles appear under his name after he was made redundant by the site in March this year.
The new articles are all about casino content and appeared on Esports Insider’s German sites.
Headlines include (in German) ‘Google Pay Casinos – the Best Casino Sites’, ‘Credit Card Casinos 2026 – The Favourites’ and ‘Baccarat Online Casinos 2026 Under Test’.
The articles had last-updated dates between 15 May and 14 July 2026.
Touati told Press Gazette: “Every one falls after 9 March, the day Clickout revoked my access, and from 23 March I wasn’t even employed. Whenever they were first written, every change happened while I was locked out…
“I never wrote or touched any of it, and couldn’t have. I covered esports for ESI, my last major piece, in February, was about AI eating esports from the inside. Casino copy is a different job. I never wrote it, then or now.”
Insiders have told Press Gazette that in total, Clickout may have bought up to 300 websites.
In the wake of the penalties issued to the sites, Clickout appears to have bought further videogame-related domains including gamereactor.se and other related domains.
The British-based company, trading as Finixio and chaired by Adam Grunwerg, reported turnover of £1,972,275 in the year to September 2025, down from £40m a year previously, and reported a loss of £1.7m.
The latest accounts state all employees were terminated at the end of 2024, suggesting Clickout Media now sits in a different corporate entity. Clickout Media Ltd is apparently based in Malta (there are is no UK Companies House listing under this name).
When sites are issued a ‘manual penalty’ by Google for offences involving search, it’s issued by a human reviewer for offences such as site reputation abuse (which parasite SEO is considered a form of).
Google says manual penalties “will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user.”
It is possible to appeal such penalties, and be restored to search (Esports Insider had previously been penalised by Google).
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