I recently stumbled upon a report about Clickout Media, a company that’s notoriously transforming reputable news sites into hubs of AI-driven gambling content. Google refers to this practice as ‘site reputation abuse’. Essentially, it involves using legacy news brands, adding fabricated bylines, embedding casino links, and eventually abandoning these sites after they incur penalties from Google.
According to PressGazette, Clickout Media has been buying sports, gaming, and tech sites only to pivot them from authentic editorial content to topics saturated with casinos and cryptocurrency. Former employees revealed that original reporting gets stripped and replaced with AI-generated articles that promote offshore gambling links.
The approach leverages existing domain authority to manipulate Google rankings. Initially, legitimate content is maintained to preserve the site’s credibility. However, as time passes, gambling content takes over, with human writers being replaced by AI-generated articles and fake author profiles. The revenue stream mainly comes from affiliate deals with casino operators, often linked to player losses.
It’s disheartening to see the impact—several previously active publications are now deindexed, with repercussions including layoffs and closures. Alarmingly, even charity websites have been repurposed to host gambling content.
In Google’s view, publishing content at such a scale purely to manipulate rankings is a breach of their policies, labeled ‘site reputation abuse.’ This can result in manual actions and the removal of these sites from Google’s search index.
As someone who cares about the integrity of SEO, it’s clear this isn’t search engine optimization in any authentic sense. It’s a blatant manipulation of reputation to deceive and gain at scale.
For those interested in learning more, Rob Waugh has an in-depth report on this issue titled ‘The SEO Parasites Buying, Exploiting and Ultimately Killing Online Newsbrands’
Inspired by this post on Search Engine Land.
