Robert McCloy
Co-founder, Scrunch AI · 1 appearance on the record.
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Robert McCloy is the co-founder of Scrunch AI. His company assists brands and businesses in rewriting content in real time to optimize for AI agents.
25statements → 12claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.64/5average certainty → 2.32/5average debate potential →
3 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 12 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 10 assertions · 7 opinions · 6 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 12 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Robert argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
Everything Robert McCloy said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
McCloy: AI is fundamentally replacing web browsing, not just search
“Thinking about what's going on in AI as really replacing search is the wrong take, or maybe not that interesting. It's really more like AI is replacing web browsing. I think that's actually like a more meaningful, like more fundamental shift.”
McCloy: Gray-Hat SEO Tactics Currently Work in AI Search
“In terms of like some of the more gray area SEO tactics like that, you know, Penguin was addressing with Google back in the day. I mean, I think the reality is a lot of those things do work today. Like I can't tell you they don't work, but I would say as like,…”
McCloy: AI chat queries represent higher commercial intent than Google informational searches
“In chat search people, people don't really do that. People just say, solve the problem for me. What I think is really interesting about that is, like, it's actually the highest intent. Like, it's the most valuable thing you could be doing. Because you're going…”
McCloy: ChatGPT Search Bans for Prompt Injection Are Coming
“I think it works until it stops working.
Right.
And I would say like, there's not a lot of stories of people getting banned for like Chatsby D search so far, but it's coming.”
McCloy: ChatGPT Does Not Index or Retrieve llms.txt by Default
“I knew that there's debate about this, but I'd say the evidence is like ChatTriPT is not indexing and it's not retrieving content from LMS.txt by default.”
McCloy: Users dislike on-site website chatbot popups
“Nobody wants to use a chatbot on your website. I don't want to use chatbots on people's websites. Like if things pop up on a website when I go to visit it, I just like, I fly into a visceral rage. I'm definitely closing the window if not closing the tab.”
McCloy: ChatGPT user experience is vastly superior to Google search
“The experience people have of using ChatGPT versus, like, Browsing the internet, sort of the old Google 10 blue links and clicking around is like vastly more positive, you know, compared to the past.”
McCloy: Stopping LLMs broadly from consuming web content will be nearly impossible
“You can fight the battle, I think, of saying, OpenAI shouldn't consume your content without paying for it, or shouldn't consume it at all. But I think it's gonna be really tough to fight the battle of saying, like, LLMs writ large shouldn't consume my content,…”
McCloy: AI search platforms still rely on traditional search algorithms under the hood
“Most of the search that's in AI search is still traditional search, right? There's an AI model in front of it, but you're still using your sort of traditional, like, you know, text-based, like, BM-Five or TF-IDF or PageRank or what have you search algorithms u…”
McCloy: ChatGPT filters out clickbait metadata in favor of descriptive information
“The metadata has been super optimized for human click through, right? So think about like clickbait, think about things that are like, you know, like Creating urgency, especially true in e-commerce, right around sales and things like that. But they're not very…”
McCloy: Enterprise users are outsourcing B2B software vendor bake-offs to ChatGPT
“One specific example that takes people a little bit by surprise is, like, there are a huge number of people doing, like, B to B software bake-offs in chat to VT. You know, if you're at a big company and your boss is like, Hey, we need to buy something to solve…”
McCloy: Optimizing for semantic embeddings does not improve AI search ranking
“But I think as a tool to understand how these AI platforms are consuming your content, embeddings aren't that relevant. You're better off focusing on, like, just, again, having a good structured set of content that makes sense, like, to a human with, like, cle…”
McCloy: ChatGPT and most AI search indexers do not execute JavaScript
“Chatsby doesn't execute JavaScript. Most of the AI Search indexers and retrievers don't execute JavaScript. So if your content is not rendered on the server side it's typically not going to be available.”
McCloy: Clerk Achieved 6x AI Traffic Growth and 9x Lift in Conversions
“So I think the stat is like, they've seen like a six X growth in ChattoBD traffic or traffic from the ChattoBD propensity, but the common set, but they've seen a nine X lifted conversions.”
McCloy: Claude users represent an exceptionally valuable audience for companies
“Claude, which is important for, you know, not necessarily huge in terms of raw number of users, but the people who do use Claude tend to be like a very valuable audience, especially for some types of company.”
McCloy: Meta AI is a 'silent monster' driven by distribution reach
“Meta AI, for example, which I don't think gets necessarily remarked upon a ton in the like AI enthusiast, AI developer community, but like it's a silent monster, right? Because of Meta's distribution and reach.”
McCloy: Most high-intent commercial AI queries increasingly rely on live search
“Most of the queries that lead to action that are sort of commercial interest are increasingly using search across these systems, like for a bunch of reasons, right? Timeliness and avoiding hallucinations and so on.”
McCloy: Allowing AI crawlers to train on short-lived promotional data is counterproductive
“You can think about the half-life of the information you're presenting and whether or not that's something that really makes sense to give to a training data crawler. So for example, like, you know, if you're an e-commerce company and you're running a seasonal…”
McCloy: ChatGPT will not pass user prompts to destination websites
“The reason I think it probably won't be the case in the future is for privacy reasons. So I don't think that you will see, at least in the context of the way search is working today inside like a system like ChatWD, I don't think you'll see that it's going to …”
McCloy: AI Search Products Lack Google's Robust Abuse Detection
“None of these products have as much Attention to detail or engineering put into them in terms of, like, moderation and abuse detection and, like, being defensive against the fact that the Internet's a wild place, as Google does, right?”
McCloy: Optimizing for AI Agents Is Essential to Serving End Users
“I think it's going to be really important to Be that data-driven about how these, like, AI systems are interacting with your content, with your website, with your infrastructure, because ultimately they are serving your ultimate customer, serving the user, and…”
McCloy: Active AI Search Optimization Delivers Double-Digit Traffic Gains in 1–2 Months
“So I would say we typically see people get double digits improvements in traffic within a month or two if they, you know, if they are actively working.”
McCloy: ChatGPT holds the most durable consumer presence among AI platforms
“ChatGPT, I would say, by far, in a way, is the thing that people think about as being an AI platform that has the strongest consumer presence and the most durable relationship with consumers.
Right.
So everything else is kind of a distant second.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| AI is Eating Search | Jul 23, 2025 | 40m |