  Environmental effects are believed to play an important yet poorly understood
role in triggering accretion events onto the supermassive black holes (SMBHs)
of galaxies (Active Galactic Nuclei; AGN). Massive clusters, which represent
the densest structures in the Universe, provide an excellent laboratory to
isolate environmental effects and study their impact on black hole growth. In
this work, we critically review observational evidence for the preferential
activation of SMBHs in the outskirts of galaxy clusters. We develop a
semi-empirical model under the assumption that the incidence of AGN in galaxies
is independent of environment. We demonstrate that the model is broadly
consistent with recent observations on the AGN halo occupation at $z=0.2$,
although it may overpredict satellite AGN in massive halos at that low
redshift. We then use this model to interpret the projected radial distribution
of X-ray sources around high redshift ($z\approx1$) massive ($>5 \times 10^{14}
\, M_\odot$) clusters, which show excess counts outside their virial radius.
Such an excess naturally arises in our model as a result of sample variance. Up
to 20% of the simulated projected radial distributions show excess counts
similar to the observations, which are however, because of
background/foreground AGN and hence, not physically associated with the
cluster. Our analysis emphasises the importance of projection effects and shows
that current observations of $z\approx1$ clusters remain inconclusive on the
activation of SMBHs during infall.
