Clickbait Title Checker
Scores a title on the patterns that get it demoted, not the ones that get it clicked.
- 100% success
Tool input
Overview
About this tool
Seven signals, each mapped to something a platform has actually published — YouTube’s misleading metadata policy, Meta’s engagement-bait demotion, TikTok’s For You ineligibility list — plus the two that are a matter of taste and are labelled as taste. 100 means no clickbait pattern was found.
Instructions
How to use it
Paste the title and pick where it appears. The score runs the way every score here runs: 100 is clean.
This is the other half of the headline analyzer
The headline analyzer asks whether a title is good, and rewards the things that earn a click. This asks the narrower and less flattering question: which of those moves has a platform written a rule against? A title can score well there and badly here, and when it does, that gap is the finding.
A clean score is not a good title
“Video About Bread” scores 100 and will not be watched. Honesty is a floor, not a strategy — run both tools and take the title that passes this one and wins the other.
Questions
Frequently asked
Does clickbait hurt your reach?
The specific kinds platforms have written rules about do: engagement bait is demoted by published Meta policy, and a title that promises something the video does not contain is a removable breach of YouTube’s misleading metadata policy. Beyond those, the cost is retention rather than a penalty.
What counts as a curiosity gap?
A title that withholds the thing it is about — “what happened next”, “the reason why will shock you”. It is the pattern every platform in the list has published against, and the one a search result cannot answer.
Are capitals and exclamation marks against the rules?
No, and the tool says so. They are scored gently and labelled as taste rather than policy — but a wholly capitalised title reads as an advert on every surface it appears on.
Is a number in the title clickbait?
The opposite. Specificity is what the tool scores highest — a title naming a number or a constraint is one a reader can decide about.
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