Google quietly penalized Clickout Media’s gambling and esports sites, and AI bylines moved in

Gambling Insider took its hit in September. CasinoBeats, PlaySense, and Gaming America are believed to be caught up in the same sweep too, though Press Gazette hasn’t confirmed penalties on those three directly. The fallout landed on the newsrooms almost immediately. Gambling Insider lost much of its editorial staff after the September penalty, and Esports Insider let go of several writers in the weeks that followed, some of whom had already survived one earlier round of layoffs only to be rehired as freelancers before being cut again. At least five bylined journalists vanished from Esports Insider entirely, and their reporting has since been replaced by stories credited to “ESI Editorial Team,” a byline whose own bio says it leans on automation and data tools. Pangram, an AI-detection service, rated the team’s output as 100 percent AI-generated.

Then it got stranger. After Press Gazette’s first story on Clickout Media ran, 28 new casino-focused articles appeared on Esports Insider’s German edition carrying the byline of Ben Touati, a reporter who says he lost access to the site’s systems on March 9 and was no longer employed there as of March 23. Touati told Press Gazette he had nothing to do with any of the 28 pieces, which carry last-updated dates stretching from May through July, and that this wasn’t the first time his name had been attached to writing he never produced; AI-generated articles had shown up under his byline once before, shortly after his original layoff.

Clickout Media’s response to all this only adds to the confusion. The company told Press Gazette it doesn’t own Esports Insider, but current and former staff who say they ran the site day to day insist otherwise, and public records tie the outlet back to Clickout and its registered entity, Finixo. Google’s site reputation abuse policy, the rule doing the damage here, has been enforced manually since May 2024, specifically to catch large publishers that rent out their domain authority to unrelated, often lower-quality content. For a company that built a chunk of its catalogue on unloading legacy media brands into gambling-adjacent content farms, losing search visibility isn’t a side effect, it’s the whole business model running into the one gatekeeper it can’t buy its way past.