In our world, attention is currency–and views unlock that currency. Getting big views means earning not just the attention of the viewers actively tuned in, but the attention of brands, managers, creator services companies, the media, platforms themselves, and more. People like MrBeast and Kai Cenat are always on the digital front page because they’re some of the top-viewed creators in the world.
So it’s not entirely unexpected that content creators who want more of the attention currency might try to game the system which grants it.
That’s where viewbotting comes in. Viewbots are fake viewers that fluff up engagement numbers. How? By ‘watching’ a creator’s video or sitting in their livestream, making it look like more people are tuning in. Padding the viewer count with just one more might not seem like a problem, but creators who employ viewbots usually don’t stop at just one. Services offering viewbots send out fleets of them, guaranteeing thousands upon thousands of views.
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Viewbotting has worsened in recent years, and Twitch has faced particular scrutiny. Creators like Trainwreck (who has an ownership stake in Kick, so perhaps take a pinch of salt here) have insisted top Twitch streamers are “botting massively and making a lot of money from it.”
This past spring, a round of viewbot accusations hit the ‘net, with xQc in April accusing Kai Cenat’s friends Reggie and Rakai of paying for views. Around the same time, Jynxzi also faced accusations due to his rapid climb to success and many thousands of concurrent viewers, but xQc defended him. Cenat, meanwhile, responded to xQc’s allegations against his friends by saying, “I don’t give a fuck. They’re all viewbotters–I don’t care.”
A month earlier, another streamer, QueenGloriaRp, was caught viewbotting when she accidentally broadcasted the program she used. Twitch banned her for breaking TOS, but that incident prompted questions about how Twitch plans to catch people who don’t out themselves.
Sites like Streams Charts, which plug in to Twitch’s API and look at data about streamers, have also been raising the alarm. Earlier this month, Streams Charts Product Manager Nazar Babenko said his company found over 41,000 Twitch channels with “at least one suspicious stream” during Q2 2025, and more than 10% “showed clear, persistent signs of viewbotting.”
It wasn’t just Twitch, though. “On Kick, the trend is just as alarming—starting in 2025, we began to consistently record over 1,000 blatant viewbotters each month, and in Q2 2025 that number tripled to nearly 3,000,” Babenko said. “This means that about one in six Kick streamers averaging 50+ viewers are now confirmed viewbotters (there were 18k+ streamers with 50+ average viewers on Kick in Q2), a record high and a sign of rapidly growing fraudulent activity on the platform.”
Kick is supposedly handling viewbotters, and as for Twitch…Its plans for botters are now here, and having a significant impact on viewership–so significant that it might already have rolled changes back.
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
At the end of July, Twitch announced it would introduce viewbot sniping that “meaningfully [improve] our ability to identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement.”
“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,” it tweeted. “Ultimately, metrics on Twitch should represent the real and growing communities that show up and participate on channels, so we regularly update detection tools and methods.”
It didn’t say what changes it planned to make, but warned streamers that if their channels were viewbotted (either by them or by a third party without their consent, which does happen occasionally), they should expect to see “an impact on your channel’s viewcount.”
Twitch appeared to hit the switch earlier this week–and almost instantly, saw a sitewide decline in viewership as high as 22%, analyst Zach Bussey reported. The decline fluctuated with time of day, he said, but remained between 5% and 22%. He added that after the viewbot snipe went live, many of Twitch’s top ~5,000 streamers had their lowest-performing streams of the year.
Twitch hit back against Bussey’s assertion, saying “viewership is by no means in decline or in free fall,” and that third-party sites were spreading “misinformation” due to incorrect data.
Streamers responding to Bussey also theorized Twitch’s snipe might have overreached, banning some lurkers (aka real human viewers who have a pattern of watching streams, but not engaging with chat) as well as genuine viewbots.
Not long after his original tweet, Bussey returned, saying he thought Twitch might have already undone its change, because most streamers were back to their pre-snipe viewcounts:
It’s a bit too early to be sure, but it looks like Twitch undid this change today.
Almost every example I looked at on Saturday that showed streamers having their lowest performing streams of the year between Thursday-Saturday, are back at their 30-day average today.
(That or… https://t.co/TschSLII4S
— Zach Bussey 🇨🇦 (@zachbussey) August 26, 2025
Twitch does have a history of reverting policy changes, but we’re not sure why it would undo this one. Brands don’t like it when their marketing dollars are impacted by fake engagement, so Twitch’s mass ban and the viewership dip it would inevitably cause might look rough in the short-term, but would be a long-term boon.
Perhaps, if Twitch did undo the snipe, that was to fine-tune it and make sure lurkers weren’t being affected.
Either way, though, API data can be finicky, so it’ll be hard to tell–at least for a while–which streamers’ channels had high percentages of viewbots…and whether their viewership will recover now that they have to appeal to actual humans.
Update, Aug. 28:
Twitch asked us to include this statement:
“We haven’t rolled back any of our viewbot tools or removal efforts. We are very committed to combating viewbotting on Twitch. We think our work here is important, not only for our service, but for the wider livestreaming industry.
Viewership fluctuates throughout the day, so you may notice some changes over time. Plus, viewbotter services work hard to evade detection and figure out new detection systems. Combatting viewbots is an ongoing process, and we continue to develop new and better methods to detect viewbots. This will always be the case.
We are fully committed to combatting inauthentic viewership on Twitch, continue to invest in our detection tools, and will continue to make updates to improve our viewbot system.”
