You have that causal relationship flipped around. Content is being optimized for clickbait engagement because that's the only way to survive, many creators have talked about this.
The algorithms are pushing garbage clickbait and AI slop while cutting off all other discovery avenues like search, this is obvious on youtube because the "search results" only contain 3 of those and then it's just more unrelated recommended garbage, the intent there couldn't be more clear.
Rossmann talked about how his repair & data recovery business website that had tons of honest, professional, high quality content for years suddenly dropped off Google and it was killing his business, but when he followed Gemini's advice and recreated the website with AI slop it started ranking #1 within weeks.
Fair points. I think my point about people targeting search overlaps actually.
Creators think they can't survive on 2k views, especially since that's not guaranteed and YouTube isn't providing actual search results all the way down the SERP providing even less opportunity to rank so then they go after more views with clickbait and engagement across broader topics that aren't going to meet a users search intent and provide specific content. In a lot of niches that might be true.
Now if they could knew they could consistently rank in search and that multiple videos producing 2k views per month, month after month and compound after time then they might have more interest in optimizing those videos more.
Im a big fan of Rossmann, and wouldn't you know I found that video you are talking about on YouTube search of all places by searching "louis rossmann creating website with gemini"
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check that out.