Dexerto spoke with Twitch about its crackdown on viewbots and rumors of views dropping across the site as a result of this moderation.
In July 2025, Twitch published a statement confirming that it was rolling out changes that “meaningfully improved our ability to identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement.”
The site’s CEO, Dan Clancy, followed up with a statement of his own, clarifying the company was taking its time in enforcing these updates as to avoid “inadvertently filtering out real users.”
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The month since then, data from platforms like Twitch Tracker has shown that viewership across the platform has been on a downtrend, with hundreds of thousands of live viewers going missing since August 21.
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
Twitch hits back at claims of viewership woes amid viewbot crackdown
We got the chance to chat with Twitch about these findings — but the site’s CPO, Mike Minton, says there hasn’t been a “free fall” in viewership as some onlookers have speculated. In fact, Twitch claimed that such statistics are outright wrong.
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“Our viewership is not in free fall, especially among the millions of community channels that are core to Twitch viewership,” the company told us.
“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.”
Still others theorized that Twitch had rolled back its updates targeting viewbotting once this supposed drop in viewership became known, notably after prominent streamer AustinShow claimed he was being viewbotted in a broadcast on August 28.
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“I thought they fixed the viewbots, but I guess I’m getting viewbotted right now,” he remarked. “There are not four thousand of you in here. If you purchased a viewbot, don’t waste your money on me.”
Twitch denied these claims, assuring Dexerto that it did not backtrack on its actions against viewbots whatsoever and see this as a “long-term” plan to enact change for streamers across its platform.
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“We did not roll back our viewbot updates,” the site said. “Combatting viewbots continues to be a priority for us. We haven’t rolled back the updates we announced earlier this month, and we will continue to iterate to stay ahead of bad actors.
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“This isn’t a short term effort. We see this as a long-term effort. We’ve been investing in this area for some time.”
Twitch is far from the only platform facing viewbotting woes; Kick has also endured similar frustrations with viewbots, with some of its top broadcasters like xQc claiming the site has “really advanced” bot-detecting technology to help mitigate the issue.
Despite efforts to combat viewbots, they continue to be an issue for both streamers and the platforms on which they broadcast, with prominent streamer Stableronaldo claiming that his own management team had offered to viewbot his channel to acquire a deal with Kick.
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