How ClickOut Media Manipulates the Trust of Authoritative Sites

I read a story about how aggressively trust can be extracted from once large and authoritative sites.

This is the business of ClickOut Media — a marketing agency that once acquired GamblingInsider.

In short: these guys disregarded the concept of domain authority and went on to bulk-buy well-known publications.

Why in bulk? Because along with the publication comes all the content, media, the brand itself, its audience, and the remnants of its trust. The last point is what ClickOut decided to exploit the most

The scheme is as follows:

• an authoritative site is purchased
• commercial verticals (gambling) are integrated into it
• staff is reduced
• editorial and content tasks are transferred to AI.

Anyone who thinks the problem lies again with AI content should watch their fingers, because that’s not the case at all.

The catch is that a domain with accumulated trust is taken and used to monetize in areas for which this trust was not originally earned.

By the way, Google calls this site reputation abuse — nothing conceptually new, except for the scale. All the sites acquired by ClickOut act as hosts.

Moreover, in 2024 it was clarified that the violation is the very goal: to use the power of the domain to manipulate rankings. Other details of the situation do not change this, as there is clear manipulation involved.

What conclusion can we draw? That any brand can be bought, dressed up, and thrown into the commercial meat grinder.

So, let’s trust the website header less and pay more attention to the project’s behavior: what is published, how often, whether the focus of the narrative has changed in the last 1-2 months. If it has changed: how related are the new and old topics, what about interlinking, and how is monetization being carried out.

And in general, be distrustful and suspicious. It saves you)