How the Twitch viewbot crackdown is hitting viewership stats

Are your views on Twitch down? It might not be your fault — blame the viewbots, or lack thereof.

Last month, Twitch said in a post on X that it would crack down on viewbots, which are essentially bots that artificially inflate viewership numbers on streams.

"We recently made changes that meaningfully improved our ability to identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement. These changes will roll out over the next few weeks," Twitch Support wrote on X on July 28. "So, if your channel was viewbotted, or if some of your viewers are artificial or inflated, you will see an impact to your channel’s viewcount."

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It makes sense to attack viewbots. As Forbes reported, Nazar Babenko, a product manager at Streams Charts posted on X that viewbotting not only hurts sponsors, but it also "undermines trust across the entire ecosystem, making it harder for genuine streamers to get noticed and for the industry to grow sustainably."

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And users are certainly seeing that impact to their channel's viewcount. Zach Bussey, an industry analyst, wrote in a post on X last weekend, as reported by Forbes, that many of the top 5,000 streamers "are experiencing their lowest-performing streams of 2025" as a result of the crackdown and "sitewide viewership is down 5-22% (depending on the hour) compared to the previous week."

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But those numbers might not be exact. Mike Minton, Twitch's CPO, told Dexerto that there hasn't been a "free fall" in viewership, and claimed that some of those statistics aren't quite right.

"Our viewership is not in free fall, especially among the millions of community channels that are core to Twitch viewership," Twitch told Dexerto. "We’ve seen some misinformation swirling, and a lot of that misinformation includes data pulled from third party sources. Those numbers are incorrect and are not from Twitch."

Twitch told Dexerto that this "isn’t a short-term effort," but one that will take a while to fully enforce.

"We see this as a long-term effort," the company told Dexerto. "We’ve been investing in this area for some time."