Twitch streamers have accused the platform of cutting their viewership numbers in October 2025 after a new update allegedly stopped counting so-called “lurkers” as viewers. Some creators say their average concurrent viewers have been cut in half.
Streamer CozyZozie laid out the issue in detail, writing, “Twitch released an update to combat paying ad revenue for viewers that are not watching ads (ex., bots.) lurkers who do not interact with the stream are being flagged as bots so their views are not reflecting in the viewership number. The past week and a half my average CCV has dropped to half of what it has been for the past year +.”
Other small and mid-sized Twitch streamers have echoed the problem. HunnieVT said, “Every single time Twitch announces changes to ‘counteract bots’ you see medium to small streamers in mass posting about their CCV getting slashed by Twitch no longer counting lurkers. Twitch KNOWS it’s not 5-50 viewer streamers giving their platform a botting problem. It’s streamers who are already doing well inflating their numbers with hundreds to thousands of bots.”
Streamer BabyyyGrim added, “I don’t know if this was an intended mechanic or if it’s a side effect of the recent update they rolled out to combat botting but yeah my viewer number has easily been half of what I see in my viewer list for the last couple weeks.”
Valan said, “I’ve been noticing the same thing lately, and it’s definitely discouraging—especially for smaller streamers. Not sure what Twitch changed or if they’ll even acknowledge it. But the real question is: what can we do as creators to adapt or push back?”
Others have attempted to verify the numbers themselves. Sw33tsTTV explained, “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not happening, [it’s] absolutely happening. I had an extension/ handcounts going live as I streamed yesterday. My handcounts always matched the extension, so I had it plotted on a graph.”
Bigger names like Trainwreckstv also weighed in, claiming the system is punishing the wrong creators. “Seems like Twitch’s anti-viewbotting program is mostly targeting and suppressing people who are not botting, all while it has not targeted or suppressed the viewership of ANY of the site’s worst botters.”
What has Twitch said?
Twitch leadership has previously denied that lurkers are affected. In August, Chief Product Officer Mike Minton told Dexerto, “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.”
CEO Dan Clancy also explained at the time, “It is important to understand that the technology that we use to detect invalid traffic for ads is separate from what we use for computing ACCV. As we filter out bots in real time, we need to be sure we are not filtering out real viewers.
“The viewbot detection tools we just rolled out went through a lot of edits. In an earlier version, as we dug deeper, we found that the tool was being overly aggressive and not counting valid traffic from various sources.”
Despite those reassurances, many creators say their numbers still do not add up, and frustration is spreading.
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