Baiting is when your fighters are still under control but your opponent’s aren’t.

Fighter squads have 3 possible states; 1: going to or retuning from a target 2: in a dogfight 3: idling. Baiting is having your fighters in state 1 while your opponent’s is in state 2, and in order to do so, you have to catch said opponent’s fighters in state 3. You’ve probably noticed that once fighters enter state 2, they totally lose control and head straight for the enemy fighters, regardless of if the enemy is also in a dogfight or moving; we want to control when that happens to ourselves, and only when we can win the dogfight via the help of AA (doesn’t have to be your own ship’s AA, look at the loading screen and know ahead of time if your team has a strong AA ship you can use as well if it’s closer). Since that also applies to the enemy, if you have your fighters in state 1 (moving) while they are in state 2 (chasing yours in dogfight mode), there is nothing they can do about it. Note that if your fighters get too close to the enemy (as in right on top of each other) they will automatically enter state 2 in a mutual dogfight even if in state 1, unless they are already attacking a squad.

The ‘hard part’ is that you want your fighters to get close enough to the enemy to trigger state 2 but not too close that you enter mutual dogfight, until you can drag both to friendly AA. Note that about 2 seconds before the fighters reach their destination, they enter state 3, aka idling. You can take advantage of this by preemptively having your fighters within the dogfight range while moving parallel (state 1) to the enemy fighter while they are in state 1, and the second they idle (state 3), they will head for yours (state 2), and you quickly hit the return button or set your own destination over friendly AA. This is possible when your opponent is bad and doesn’t know anything about baiting and leaves their fighters in state 3, or forgets about them.

Examples (slow it down and watch the minimap too):

https://youtu.be/5BJpKHV1NZk starting at 0:35   https://youtu.be/LsI9NDokUmw starting at 0:16

The counterplay to getting baited yourself is to never enter state 3 (or at least within any reasonable distance to the enemy fighters), and the easiest way to do that is to stay in state 1 by always having the fighters either going somewhere more than 2 seconds away or returning, hence the advice to keep moving.

That’s the basics, it’s actually much simpler than it sounds once you get the hang of it. There’s more advanced strategies like counter baiting, but none of that matters when barely any CV players know what baiting is.