Are your Twitch views suffering? It might not be your doing — place the blame on viewbots, or the absence of them.
Last month, Twitch declared on X that it would intensify its efforts against viewbots, which are automated programs that artificially boost viewership figures for streams.
“We recently implemented modifications that significantly enhanced our capacity to detect viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fraudulent engagement. These modifications will be deployed over the coming weeks,” Twitch Support stated on X on July 28. “Thus, if your channel fell victim to viewbotting, or if some of your viewers are fake or exaggerated, you will notice a change in your channel’s view count.”
Targeting viewbots is a logical step. As reported by Forbes, Nazar Babenko, a product manager at Streams Charts, shared on X that viewbotting not only adversely impacts sponsors, but it also “erodes trust throughout the whole ecosystem, making it difficult for authentic streamers to gain visibility and for the industry to grow sustainably.”
And users are undoubtedly noticing that effect on their channel’s view metrics. Zach Bussey, an industry analyst, mentioned in a post on X last weekend, as noted by Forbes, that numerous top 5,000 streamers “are facing their least productive streams of 2025” due to the crackdown and “overall viewership is down 5-22% (depending on the time) when compared to the previous week.”
However, those figures may not be entirely accurate. Mike Minton, Twitch’s CPO, informed Dexerto that there has not been a “free fall” in viewership, asserting that some of those statistics may be somewhat misleading.
“Our viewership is not in free fall, especially among the millions of community channels that form the backbone of Twitch viewership,” Twitch informed Dexerto. “We’ve noticed some misinformation circulating, and a lot of that misinformation involves data sourced from third-party origins. Those numbers are inaccurate and do not originate from Twitch.”
Twitch conveyed to Dexerto that this “is not a quick fix,” but rather a process that will take time to fully implement.
“We view this as a long-term initiative,” the company expressed to Dexerto. “We have been investing in this area for quite a while.”