In the Twitch world of live streaming for the past decade, the unwritten rule was straightforward: you ground out in anonymity for years, hoping for that Big Break of virality, or you “cheated.”
“Cheating” in the streaming world meant “viewbotting.” It was the industry’s dirty little secret. “For just a few dollars, streamers hired third-party sites to generate empty accounts that flooded their channel and increased their view count, sometimes in the tens of thousands. The numbers rose, but the chats were lifeless.”
It was simply another house of cards that always collapsed under the weight of the very platform it sought to cheat.
However, as we near the end of 2025, the concept of “cheating” is also being rendered obsolete in light of the giant leap in artificial intelligence. And the “zombie bot” days are behind us—as are about to be explained.
Leading this change is Viewbots.com, which has arguably shifted from what it described as its “gray market” phase and is now operating within the mainstream of legitimate advertising infrastructure on Twitch and Kick. In their latest analytical report released this week, it is clear that the playing field has changed dramatically: More than 85% of the traffic generated from their premium services comes from human visitors.
“Death of the ‘Zombie Bot’”
In order to grasp the importance of this, it is necessary to first discuss the “Discovery Problem.” Twitch doesn’t have an algorithm for new channels. If you don’t have any viewers, you are ranked at the very bottom of the directory. Nobody scrolls down that far. It’s like screaming in the void.
For years, buying views meant buying a number to escape that basement. And then the accounts were just that—fake. They didn’t buy subscriptions. They didn’t talk. They didn’t care.
Viewbots.com boasts that it has solved this problem in two ways: through its two proprietary technologies, Aurora AI and Sentinel.
“Envision Aurora AI less like a bot script and more like an ultra-aggressive match engine,” describes a digital marketing analyst who tracks this trend. “It searches for web users interacting with certain types of gaming content—think Battlefield or Stardew Valley—then routes that traffic to the client’s live stream via embedded players and recommendations.”
So what happens? “Viewer” in the total count?
That’s no line of code on some server farm. That’s some dude in Ohio during his lunch hour or some kid in Germany trying to find the next streamer to follow.
The “Sentinel” Safety Net
Data coming in from Viewbots’ “Sentinel Phase” rollout reveals just how shocking this level of efficiency is. Data analysis over four months indicated that this “bought” cohort of viewers was engaging in server joins, redemption of Channel Points, and conversations at rates similar to that of naturally acquired audiences.
The Sentinel technology is the gatekeeper. In the past, viewbotting on Twitch would be risky because when 1,000 bots logged in at the same time, it alerted Twitch’s security system.
Sentinel hides the growth curve of views and clicks because it imitates human behavior such as scrolling, pauses in scrolling, and changes in resolutions. However, the main role of Sentinel at this point in time is that of a filter. It makes sure that the traffic Aurora obtains is of quality.
Is It Cheating, or Is It Marketing?
“Viewbotting” poses such a challenge that it forces the streaming world to answer this difficult question: “If you pay for viewers and 85% of them are real people who hang around, is it still viewbotting?”
Or is it just. Advertising?
“If someone pays Facebook for their ad to be seen by 1,000 people, that’s what we mean by smart marketing,” notes James A., partner level streamer, who owes his early success to the platform.
“But if the streamer pays for someone to get 1,000 people to watch their stream, that was cheating in the past. That taboo is falling away,” added James. “I didn’t pay for followers. I paid for the introduction. That introduction is made via the AI algorithm, and it is the quality of the content that keeps them.”
Economics justifies such change. Now that the “Partner Prodigy” bundles are in use, content creators are witnessing good returns on their investment for the service. In fact, the cost of acquisition is regained via advertisement and subscription income garnered from the human that the use of the AI models directs them to.
The Future of Discovery
Because Twitch and the rising rival Kick are only getting more and more oversaturated, the “hope and pray” approach to expanding the service is becoming statistically impossible.
“The Sentinel Phase” proposes that the future of streaming is less about who has the better personality and more about who has the better infrastructure. Viewbots.com has successfully harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to level the playing field. They have made the “zero viewer problem” solvable.
“Natural growth” will still be advocated as if it exists in some manner. In this world of digital internet leadership and algorithms, “natural” doesn’t exist. And those who emerge victorious in this next wave of streaming are no longer just playing at winning—but are instead building their own crowd. Never mind that this crowd is finally real.
