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glb file format

POSTED 2025.01.04
BY Shavon Nand

Screenshot of Google's AI Summary from a Google search of 'glb file format'

I wanted to look at the quality of Google’s first page of search results, using search operators to exclude AI written articles and remove Google’s AI Summary.

Basically, using search operators, specifically before: and -ai. ChatGPT launched in 2022, so by using before: we can filter out results published before then, this will exclude newer articles which might be AI written. To remove the AI Overview that now appears at the top of search results we will use -ai.

The idea came from this video:

Going through and using the search operators we can see that the link for https://www.khronos.org/Gltf, which are the people behind glTF, isn’t on the first page of Google results. It only appears after I use the -ai search operator to remove the AI Summary.

Screenshots of Google's search results for 'glb file format' with different search operators, highlighting the links to 'glTF Overview - The Khronos Group Inc'

If we highlight any links from khronos.org we get links to https://www.khronos.org/files/gltf20-reference-guide.pdf for our before:2018 -ai search, and links to https://registry.khronos.org/glTF/specs/2.0/glTF-2.0.html for our before:2022 -ai and before:2023 -ai searches.

Screenshots of Google's search results for 'glb file format' with different search operators, highlighting any links to khronos.org

The featured snippet also doesn’t use the direct source https://www.khronos.org/Gltf, unless we search before:2018 -ai and earlier years.

Screenshots of Google's search results for 'glb file format' with different search operators, highlighting the featured snippets; khronos.org in blue, other sites in red

ChatGPT written articles have pushed out the actual useful results, and now Google is using those poorly written AI articles as sources for it’s AI Overview.

Screenshot of Google's AI Summary from a Google search of 'glb file format'

Anyways, heres some information about the “glb file format”.

.glb is the filename extension for Binary glTF (1).
glTF stands for Graphics Language Transmission Format or GL Transmission Format (2).
Binary glTF is a binary option for storing the content for a glTF asset (2).
A glTF asset is represented by a JSON-formatted file .gltf, binary files .bin and image files .jpg, .png (3).
glTF files are stored in GLB container .glb (4).
Link to the IANA registration: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/model/gltf-binary
Link to the Specification by the Khronos Group: https://www.khronos.org/gltf
Link to the GLB File Format Specification: https://registry.khronos.org/glTF/specs/2.0/glTF-2.0.html#glb-file-format-specification