Heat transfer deterioration (HTD) is one of the important problems in the study of supercritical fluid (SCF) heat transfer. However, SCF is very complicated because of the none-quilibrium process when it crosses the pseudo-critical point. Recently, the existence of SCF pseudo-boiling at the macro scale causes controversy. There is still no unified understanding of the effect mechanism of gas-like and liquid-like transition on heat transfer. In this paper, it is assumed that SCF has a macroscopic phenomenon similar to subcritical flow boiling. By analogy with subcritical boiling heat transfer, a boiling critical point model is proposed to describe the HTD in supercritical CO
2. Our study reveals the HTD caused by pseudo-boiling only occurs under large temperature gradient, which makes the superheated liquid-like layer cover the wall, and the gas-like and liquid-like may present different distribution forms, thus changing the heat transfer characteristics. When the wall temperature is greater than the pseudo-critical temperature and the enthalpy of the fluid layer covering the wall exceeds a certain value, the HTD may occur. The proposed theoretical model can explain the experimental results well, and the prediction accuracy of heat transfer correlation considering pseudo-boiling is greatly improved. In this paper, the connection between supercritical heat transfer and subcritical heat transfer is established theoretically, which provides a new idea for the study of SCF heat transfer deterioration and enriches the theory of supercritical heat transfer.