How to Spot Fake Engagement Before Your Client Does

Picture this: a client approves a blastful Twitch campaign with a rising star streamer having thousands of followers, non-stop chat activity, and glowing engagement metrics. Everything looks perfect — until the fact-checking moment...

A few days later: complete oblivion. No clicks. No sales. Just a poor report and a very disappointed client. Turns out, the “streamer” was all smoke and mirrors — bots, fake hype, and zero real reach.
For the agency, it’s more than a missed KPI. It’s reputational damage. It’s lost trust. It’s that awful moment when you realize: you were outsmarted by fake engagement.

In this article, we’ll talk today about how to see those red flags before your client does — and how real-time data, not anything else, should drive your Twitch influencer vetting.

What Are Twitch View Bots? Understanding the Two Main Types

There are two kinds of accounts that we would consider a viewbot.
1) The first kind is the computer-generated software meant to imitate a user. And this is probably what you're imagining as a traditional streamer fraud — just a bunch of beep-boops roaming the internet.
2) Then, there is a second group of Twitch bots called the “embeds”. They place your stream or video on some other site and then have it play in, say, a 1x1 pixel in the corner. Not all embeds are necessarily bad, but it's heavily disingenuous when it's plastered in a place where you know nobody's gonna watch it. But, since it still counts you as a viewer, it may as well be.

In the context of something like Twitch, viewbotting yourself, even by 10–15 viewers, puts you in the top 1%, so for most directories, you're gonna be right at the top, which is where the quote-unquote “discoverable” streams are. Because everybody knows Twitch is a kingmaker system. If you're not in the first couple of lines in any given directory, you're never gonna be found, at least on Twitch, so you're way more reliant on bringing people over from other platforms.

It's not that the content they're feeding you is necessarily any better or worse — they're just tricking you into thinking it is. Once you're at the top, you start spurring legitimate engagement from people who think it's good. If you have 15–20 viewers, but only 1 or 2 people are talking, that's considered to be normal in most aspects. It ends up being corrosive as a whole because nobody ever sees any value or benefit. Or do they?

Why Viewbotting Works — and Why It Hurts Everyone

See, there are three people involved in this sort of thing:

1. The platform

2. The viewer

3. The person who is viewbotting

The Three Sides of Twitch Viewbotting: Platform, Viewer, and Streamer

The platform.

Platforms are beholden to one person and one person only: the advertiser. They're basically like the Illuminati of everything that exists. It doesn't matter what multimedia site you're on — if it exists, it runs on ads (assuming you're not paying for it). The problem with this sort of fake viewership, fake metrics, is what happens when you're serving ads to people that don't exist.

Let’s put you in the shoes of an advertiser. You pay $100 to show 100 people an ad. How angry would you be to find out that 50 of the people that you advertised to within that budget didn't even exist? Yeah, you wouldn't be too thrilled to know that.

So, platforms don't exactly take too kindly to that, for that very reason. Because of how corrosive it is, once advertisers find out that what they're advertising on isn't even what they're getting. So, for the platforms themselves, it is a very bad thing.

The viewer.

A lot of this is reliant on user psychology. Because of how the internet works, people generally tend toward groupthink. It's essentially the idea behind things like product reviews. If 50 people think this product is okay and you're in the market for it, then it would stand to reason that you might also like that product.

Within the context of an internet thing like a YouTube video or Twitch stream, we value things based on the view count that they initially get. Something with higher viewership must be entertaining, therefore worth watching 5 minutes, or however long I intend to watch it.

A bigger number equals a better person. So, when you view bots like this, you put yourself, at least on Twitch, at the very top of a directory. Which, as everybody knows, is where most of the discoverability on Twitch comes from.

The creators.

Within the vast sea of what we call the internet, there exist two kinds of people (at least in the creative sphere): the creatives who are viewbotting and the ones who aren't. If we just take the magnifying glass and look at something like Twitch, we all know that Twitch is a kingmaker system where the top people in the directory get the whole pie, because they're the only ones that get clicks.

You have the people actually, genuinely trying that end up getting buried by people who are viewbotting — because they’re the ones clogging up the top parts of the directory. Something that could have otherwise gone to a legitimate creator.

So, they see a value benefit in that. They get higher in the directory. But because it cannibalizes the others, it ends up being corrosive for the entire platform, because people who genuinely are funny, that do deserve a shot, now don’t get one on account of not cheating the system. So, it creates a market incentive: either cheat the system or die with your morals. The only person who sees any value in that sort of exchange is the one who is viewbotting. The main thing they sell to advertisers is a stat called DAU — Daily Active Users.

Whenever somebody viewbots, because they’re counted as a legitimate person, this allows platforms to sell to advertisers at a directly inflated price. So, in the case of something like Twitch, it’s in their direct financial interest not to do anything about this, or just turn a blind eye. Which is exactly why they allow embeds but not direct bots, even though fundamentally they serve the same purpose. Because as long as it looks like you're popular, people will treat you like you're popular.

Red Flags for Identifying Fake Twitch Influencers

Some marketers can notice low-quality streamers before launching a campaign. There are a couple of main alerts visible on the Entyx dashboard or directly on the streamer’s channel:

Inconsistent numbers

People popular in one place tend to be popular in other places, too. They might have one main hub, but it tends to spill into others.

No chat, or chatbot followers on Twitch

Obvious red flag. Streamer has got 30 viewers and not a single person is talking? What’s going on there? Or vice versa: the chat is way too loud with the same phrases outside of the context - chat bots alert.

Staggering in analytics

You see large jumps in viewership and an additional 10K followers for no clear reason — no event, no viral video. If the splash is not connected with a real activity, then it’s a sign to consider them buying this traffic.

Outrageous numbers

25K followers, but no one in the industry has heard about this streamer? Come on.

Abnormally high engagement with a low average online

ER of 12% sounds cool. But if a streamer has an average of 50 viewers, but thousands of likes and reactions, it means that part of the engagement is obviously “artificial”.

Mismatch between reach and audience reaction

If a stream is watched by 5K people, but no one clicks on banners, follows links, or reacts, this is an indicator of a “dead” audience or baiting.

Entyx: Real-Time Twitch Streamer Vetting for Agencies

The Entyx platform offers a comprehensive AI-driven dashboard empowering agencies to look at any streamer under the microscope. This is not just a list of metrics, but an advanced system to evaluate the efficiency of Twitch channels with real-time analytics.

Twitch streamer dashboard has the main advantage: a detailed 360-degree overview of each streamer’s channel, including key metrics, such as:

• Reach

• Engagement Rate (ER)

• Follower count

• Chat activity

• Sentiment tracking

• Media value

• Click-through rate (CTR)

Entyx offers a dedicated Streamer HUB tab where you can sort streamers by the language they speak during the stream, making your selection even more precise. When you open a concrete channel, you get detailed analytics, like the total watch time in hours and the average number of viewers. You’ll not only see the numbers but also charts displaying activity growth or decline, the most successful streams, and the ones that didn’t perform as well.

Data-Driven Decisions: Why Entyx Doesn’t Guess — It Measures

Channel statistics will show you detailed metrics over a specific period. For instance, you can view:

• Number of streams in the last 30 days

• Average stream length over the past week

• Real-time subscriber growth

• Estimated subscriber revenue

Chat Analytics display the dynamics of chat messages, making it easier to spot potential fraud: for instance, 40 viewers online but only 3 chat messages. Entyx automatically calculates how much it costs to contact the audience, how many views were there at the moment of ad banner placement, and how many viewers were present at the stream after the advertisement. This excludes guesses and manual calculations — the agency gets accurate data in a few clicks. Thanks to the Keywords Tracking it's possible to identify real and fake viewers in the chat:

Entyx does not alert to fraud but gives a full set of data to recognize fake streamers. And based on this info, marketers can make data-driven decisions and take responsibility for influencer vetting.

Final Thoughts: Real Data Beats Fake Hype

In the times when every person can buy fame, followers, and comments, real-time data is the main protection. Agencies that can analyze engagement and choose wisely, streamers will always be ahead of competitors, and advertisers will choose them to launch campaigns.

Entyx offers agency tools for Twitch that simplify workflow. Data-driven influencer marketing empowers agencies to choose the right streamer as it means budget protection, trust increase, and a successful campaign. Start vetting smarter. Use Entyx to see what’s real. Sign up!