Twitch reports a dip in viewership after cracking down on viewbots

After clamping down on viewbots, the live streaming platform Twitch is facing a downward plunge in the number of viewers. The platform is looking at as much as a 24% reduction in its viewers week after week, as per Dexerto.

Viewbots are third party applications or webpages which falsely increase the viewership of a streamer or content creator, notes Game Rant. The media outlet observes that while viewbots serve to increase a creator’s ad revenue, they can also be used to harass creators by bombarding their channels with hate messages.

Twitch shares that viewbots often use “illegitimate scripts or tools” to increase the concurrent live views of a channel. The platform notes that often, the practice of viewbotting takes place alongside “chat activity bots,” which mimic a streamer’s engagement with a viewer.

Twitch also warns that viewbots are different from a legitimate increase in a streamer’s viewers which can often be a result of promotional activities which include the channel being embedded or the creator being hosted.

Have you touched grass today? pic.twitter.com/ihs5tsm2mp

— Twitch (@Twitch) August 21, 2025

With Twitch’s attempts to crack down on bots which artificially increase the view count of the creators operating on its platform, the Amazon owned company began to see a reduction in viewers beginning from August 21.

According to Dexerto, viewership on Twitch dropped to 24% less than the week before on August 22, and to 23% less than the week before on August 24.

Twitch announced its crackdown of viewbots in July

Towards the end of July, Twitch announced its plans to tackle viewbotting over the coming days and weeks. In a post on X, Twitch’s support account stated,

“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.”

A quick update on viewcounts. We have teams and tech dedicated to ensuring that the views that show up on channels reflect actual viewership, and aren’t artificially inflated in any way. Ultimately, metrics on Twitch should represent the real and growing communities that show up… pic.twitter.com/Pr6XaoSCfP

— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) July 28, 2025

The platform also noted that streamers might see their viewership counts decreasing as the company’s measures start to come into effect. Warning that such measures have been taken to promote the growth of channels and streamers on Twitch in an organic manner, the company’s support team shared that it seeks to improve the streaming experience.

Twitch’s CEO, Dan Clancy also opened up about the platform’s adoption of new measure to control viewbotting. In a post on X, Clancy sought to clear up any confusion regarding the company’s stand on viewbots, and he said that Twitch has always sought to “eliminate” artificial viewers. He wrote,

“I want to be very clear that we always try to detect and eliminate viewbots. However, doing this in a manner that does not eliminate real viewers can be tricky.  While I know for some of you it has been frustrating, we wanted to take our time to make sure we were not inadvertently filtering out real users.”

Clancy also added that Twitch’s most recent measures to counter viewbotting are a part of the company’s mission to keep on improve its viewbot detection systems. He remarked,

“As is always the case, detecting viewbots is a bit of a cat and mouse game as third parties work to avoid our detection.  We will continue monitoring and make updates over time to improve our viewbot detection system.”

In an additional clarification, Clancy also wrote that the process of taking “enforcement action” against viewbots is complex as it can not be safely determined if an individual streamer is responsible for the viewbotting of their channel.

In the coming days and weeks, it remains to be seen if the viewership of some of the most popular streamers is impacted. As per Dexerto, Asmongold is already facing a drop in his viewers.