I'm not sure why you're defending clickbait. It is just fraud. I'm not sure why we pretend it is anything different.

Sure, people made overblown claims about the effects, but that doesn't justify fraud. A little fraud is less bad than major fraud, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad.

On the one hand, you have SEO mills churning out crap and A/B testing clickthrough rates on different headline/image combinations. That's bad.

On the other hand, you have a blogger choosing a headline for a cool thing that they did and wrote up...

The author here writes up what happens. They include ample discussion of search in their write-up. They do not need to write the entire blog post in the title in order to avoid 'fraud.' Yeesh.

IDK what SEO mills and all that have to do with any of this. What other people do doesn't matter. It's something is bad then it doesn't make it not bad because other people do it and do it worse. There's no logic in that framing.

I'm not sure who you think is a fool, me or you. But either way, I don't find your rhetoric acceptable. I explained why I think the title significantly diverges from the content of the article. You're welcome to disagree but that argument will have nothing to do with SEO mills. It's insulting you'd think I'd accept such a silly retort. We're not comparing here, we're categorizing.

In short, the title of the piece is in no way fraudulent: No one is being defrauded here, and I don't believe there was any intent to defraud anyone.

The title is not click bait. Titles might be better or worse for their content, but imperfection is not fraud.

I'm sorry. You have failed the assignment. You have written an assertion, not an argument. I'm not willing to just take your word on it.

But thank you for clarifying the implicit question in my earlier comment.