Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

McCloy: ChatGPT filters out clickbait metadata in favor of descriptive information

Robert McCloy · AI is Eating Search · Jul 23, 2025 · at 18:06

Robert McCloy, co-founder of Scrunch.ai, explains how AI search engines re-rank search results based on page metadata before content summarization.

0:00 / 0:32exact quote · 32.9s
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“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 informational about what actually is on the page. And then what we see is like, regardless of search ranking, often Like, a system like ChatTVT chooses not to use those, right? So it will re-rank them out of the consideration set, and then it'll just kind of go on to the next best result that has a more descriptive metadata saying, hey, this page actually has something that's relevant to your question on it.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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