I built a Telegram bot through BotFather and connected it to my web application hosted on Vercel. More than 30 people have actually used my bot and accessed the app, but when I look up my bot in Telegram’s search function, it still shows only 4 users.
This is really confusing because I know way more people have interacted with my bot. The user count seems stuck at 4 even though my analytics show much higher usage.
Is there a way to either update this user count or completely hide it from showing up in search results? I already tried using BotFather commands to modify this but nothing worked.
Has anyone else run into this issue where Telegram displays the wrong number of bot users? Any suggestions would be helpful.
exactly! user counts are pretty meaningless anyway - they don’t show actual usage. just get your bot out there and share the link. people care way more about how well it works than some random number.
Had the same issue with my bot about six months back. That user count in Telegram search doesn’t show real-time interactions or actual users messaging your bot. From what I’ve seen, it tracks something else entirely - maybe users who explicitly started or subscribed in some specific way. It’s basically just for show and won’t affect how your bot works or gets found. I’ve seen successful bots with thousands of real users showing weirdly low numbers in search. There’s no way to manually update this counter through BotFather or the API either. If you’re worried the low count might turn people off, just add something in your bot’s description that shows it’s actively used instead of depending on that useless metric.