Dexerto spoke with Twitch regarding its battle against viewbotting and concerns from users that streamers could be purchasing bots to defraud advertisers.
In July 2025, Twitch announced that it was making changes to how it combats viewbotting on its platform. ‘Viewbotting’ refers to the act of artificially inflating streamers’ viewer counts by purchasing automated scripts, or bots, that ‘watch’ their broadcasts instead of an actual human.
Twitch claimed that it had tweaked how it detects viewbots, with CEO Dan Clancy explaining that the company was proceeding with care to avoid potentially “filtering out real users.”
Twitch allays fears of ad fraud via viewbotting
We got the chance to chat with Twitch’s CPO, Mike Minton, about how the site detects bots. While Minton assured us that Twitch errs on the side of caution, this doesn’t mean that advertisers are getting bamboozled by streamers using viewbots to boost their numbers.
“Ad fraud is not rampant on Twitch,” he explained. “The technology that we use to detect invalid traffic for ads is separate from what we use to calculate active concurrent viewer count. Advertisers are not charged for invalid impressions – including viewbots – and creators do not get paid out for these impressions.
“This is one of the reasons why there’s a delay between when a streamer accrues ad revenue, and when it shows up in the dashboard – we do several checks to ensure the traffic was legitimate.
“This is an area we continue to work on, to ensure that brands are maximizing their value on Twitch. This is something that must be addressed industry wide. We have an influencer marketing tool that helps in this area.”
Twitch spoke with Dexerto in an exclusive interview, denying statistics that claimed the platform had seen a decrease in viewership ever since taking action against viewbots in August 2025.
Essentially, Minton said that Twitch is careful to avoid wrongfully punishing streamers for viewbotting, but can weed out viewbots after the fact to give advertisers the correct information since the tools for detecting active viewers and phony impressions are separate.
Twitch makes sure to count ‘lurkers’ and real viewers, too
Minton also assured us that Twitch counts “real viewers,” including lurkers, for broadcasters who are worried their number of viewers and active chatters don’t line up.
“We’re very mindful and continually monitoring impact, especially for smaller channels,” he said. “Before we launched our new viewbotting detection tools, we tested a lot of versions to make sure that we wouldn’t unintentionally filter out real viewers.
“Lurkers are unaffected by the viewbot update, and we checked our internal data to confirm this. Our tools compare a number of signals to determine whether an account is a bot – we don’t remove accounts we aren’t absolutely sure about.”
Twitch says the “vast majority” of streamers aren’t viewbotting
Ultimately, Minton — and Twitch as a whole — are being cautious, as viewbotting can both be purchased by a streamer or by someone else to harass them — or even by fans who are trying to help their favorite broadcaster reach a new milestone, unbeknownst to them.
Twitch streamer and Novo.TV CMO Devin Nash previously claimed that the “majority” of Twitch’s top 500 broadcasters were viewbotting, and Twitch’s CEO Dan Clancy also said “thousands” of small streamers were using bots in July 2025. Minton, however, says the majority of streamers are not engaging in viewbotting.
“It’s important to distinguish between the types of viewbotting we’ve seen, neither of which we want on Twitch,” Minton said. “We know that some use viewbots to harass others, so it was important that we tackle those. Some use viewbots to inflate their own viewership and attempt to game the system. The vast majority of Twitch streamers aren’t viewbotting.
“It really comes down to the fact that it’s not one hundred percent deterministic, right? You get an inbound request. There are a lot of attributes on that request you need to make a decision about, and you can make it both on an individual request basis or in aggregate.
“And so as a consequence, there are thresholds by which we make decisions. And the point I was trying to make is that we will accept some very tiny amount of viewbotting activity in the interest of not removing viewers from small streamers, as opposed to the inverse of being much more aggressive and potentially removing real viewers to reduce viewbotting.”
Both Twitch and Kick have taken action against viewbotting, with multi-streamer xQc saying the latter platform has “really advanced” bot-detecting technology to help crack down on the practice.
We asked Twitch about how it measures up against other streaming sites in regards to viewbotting, and Minton told us that the company is firmly focused on protecting its community of streamers and their viewers.
“ The difference for us is we are publicly stating, ‘We will not tolerate this and we will remove viewbots, and we are gonna make the investments necessary to remove viewbots. This is something we see as really critically important for us and we have some experience here in dealing with other very large problems at scale on Twitch.
“We’re obviously backed by a very large technology company. So all I’ll say for us at Twitch is that we’re really focusing on protecting and taking care of our community.”
