Cliff Notes – Twitch viewership plummets to five year low after bot crackdown hits viewcounts

Twitch’s recent crackdown on bots has led to a significant decline in viewership, with peak concurrent viewers dropping by 73% in August compared to the previous month.
Despite Twitch’s denial of a ‘free fall’ in viewership, third-party tracking sites report the lowest average viewership since March 2020, raising concerns about the platform’s metrics.
The issue of viewbotting is not exclusive to Twitch, as reports indicate that a substantial number of streamers on rival platforms also engage in similar practices, highlighting a broader industry challenge.

Twitch viewership plummets to five year low after bot crackdown hits viewcounts

The bot problem (Twitch)

Viewership on Twitch is declining as the platform targets streamers using bots, but the platform disputes a ‘free fall’ in its numbers.

Twitch has grown into one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world, since it launched in 2011, spawning rivals like Kick, YouTube Gaming, and Microsoft’s now-defunct Mixer.

However, over the past few months there’s been reports of a decline in viewership. This was sparked after Twitch announced, in July, that it had made changes to better ‘identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement’ on the service, which would ‘roll out over the next few weeks’.

This crackdown on bots, used by streamers to artificially inflate their viewcounts, has now seemingly resulted in the platform’s lowest recorded viewership in five years.

According to Streams Charts, which tracks viewership numbers across streaming sites, Twitch’s peak concurrent viewership dropped by 73% to 3,777,049 million in August, when compared to the previous month.

While this drop in peak viewership is mostly due to the record-breaking popularity of last month’s boxing event, La Velada del Año V, by Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos (which hit over 9 million peak viewers), there are drops in the figures elsewhere.

According to the report, hours watched in August fell by 9%, while the average amount of viewers dropped by 8%. The crackdown on bots is cited as the main reason for this downturn, with the figures described as the lowest since March 2020.

Expert, exclusive gaming analysis

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 numbers from fellow viewership tracking tool TwitchTracker show a similar picture. According to the site, the average viewers has steadily dropped since June this year, with the figures for August 2025 peaking at 2,013,579 million. This is the lowest since March 2020’s average viewership of 1,638,049 million.

Prior to these numbers, Twitch’s chief product officer, Mike Minton, denied the platform’s viewership is in ‘free fall’ following the platform’s bot crackdown, describing data from third party sites as ‘misinformation’.

‘Our viewership is not in free fall, especially among the millions of community channels that are core to Twitch viewership,’ Minton told Dexerto last month.

‘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.’

The problem is Twitch doesn’t release official viewing figures, so it only has itself to blame for people relying on third party sources. Weirdly though, the platform did acknowledge third party sites when it announced its plan to target bots.

‘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,’ a Twitch Support post on X from July read. ‘This also means that third party sites that publish unverified Twitch viewcounts are going to see changes to that data over time.’

It remains to be seen if these figures will continue to drop over the coming months, or if bots will find some sort of workaround to Twitch’s new measures, but it might uncover an uncomfortable truth around the platform’s viewership.

However, this isn’t a problem unique to Twitch. According to a report on Streams Charts, 1 in 6 streamers on Kick rely on viewbots, generating over 20 million fake hours watched in the second quarter of 2025 alone. In the same report, it was claimed 40,000 channels on Twitch were hit by viewbotting.

League Of Legends is still one of the most-viewed games on Twitch (Riot Games)

Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

Comment now

Comments