Definition of "clickbait"

Fairfax's sites are renowned for what is sometimes called ‘clickbait’: headlines written to beguile passing eyeballs but which obscure nondescript or irrelevant stories.

2012, Gideon Haigh, The Deserted Newsroom, Penguin

"His careful lawyerly writing would be out of fashion now", wrote one commenter after Kettle's piece. "It wasn't clickbait".

2013 September 29, Peter Preston, The Observer

In August 2016, leaders at Facebook announced a plan to identify and limit clickbait, because the Facebook newsfeed goal is to “show people the stories most relevant to them.”

2017, Ted Kwartler, Text Mining in Practice with R, John Wiley & Sons

In comparison with algorithms used in the past, this SI based technique provided a better accuracy and a human interpretable set of rules to classify clickbaits

2019, Deepanshu Pandey, Garimendra Verma, Sushama Nagpal, “Clickbait Detection Using Swarm Intelligence”, in Advances in Signal Processing and Intelligent Recognition Systems

Whether they're acts of clickbaiting or dumbness, internet headlines routinely mischaracterize quotes, inaccurately paraphrase statements, and misuse specific terms, all to make readers click.

2015, How to Write About Music, page 60

But he'd clickbaited her.

2017, Ainslie Paton, The Love Experiment

I have never clickbaited anyone with overexaggerated titles, but also never downplayed the severity of the content within.

2017, Brian Whitney, Subversive: Interviews with Radicals