How to Get More Users for Your Telegram Bot in 2026

Getting more users for your Telegram bot in 2026 is mostly unglamorous work that compounds. There is no growth hack. There is a short list of things that reliably bring people in, and most bot owners have done none of them because they are busy building features instead.

This is that list, in the order I would do it, with the reasoning for each. Nothing here needs a budget.

Why most Telegram bots never get more users

Telegram has no App Store. There is no ranked chart that surfaces good bots to people browsing, no editorial front page, and no algorithm that rewards quality. A bot is a URL. If nobody hands somebody that URL, nobody arrives.

That is the whole problem, and it means growth is entirely a distribution question rather than a product one. Your bot can be better than everything in its category and still get thirty users a month.

Everything below is a way to put the link somewhere a person will find it.

Fix your bot's search listing first

Telegram's own search is the largest source of bot discovery, and it is the one most owners get wrong. It costs nothing to fix and takes ten minutes.

Telegram matches a search query against your bot's display name and username. It does not search your description. So a bot called Sora is invisible to anyone searching for "crypto price", no matter how good the description is.

Open BotFather and set these four things properly:

The description field is a conversion surface, not a bio. Somebody has already clicked your link and is deciding whether to press Start. Tell them what happens next, in one line.

Get your bot listed somewhere it can be indexed

A listing does something your bot cannot do for itself: it gives you a page that Google can index. Nobody finds t.me/yourbot through a search engine, because a Telegram bot link has no page behind it. A listing page about your bot does, and it keeps working for years after you write it once.

That is the whole argument for being listed, and it is why this is the best hour on this page in terms of effort against return.

What a listing needs to be worth having:

Getting listed here gives you all five. Look at Sora or StarNinja for the shape. We read every listing by hand and turn plenty away, so it takes a few days rather than being instant. That is the point of it: a directory anyone can auto-post into is worth nothing to the people already in it.

Wherever you end up hosting it, the underlying point holds. "Best telegram bot for X" is exactly what your future users type into Google and into an AI assistant. If your bot exists only as t.me/yourbot, then to every search engine and every assistant on earth, your bot does not exist.

Post where your users already are

This is the part everyone does badly. Dropping your link into twenty unrelated groups gets you removed from twenty groups and converts nobody.

The version that works is slower and much more effective:

1. Find five groups where your actual users already talk. tgstat.com is genuinely good for this, or search Telegram for the topic and sort by size.
2. Join and say nothing for a week. Learn what gets asked repeatedly.
3. Answer those questions properly, without mentioning your bot at all.
4. When somebody asks a question your bot literally solves, answer it and say the bot is how you would do it.

That last message converts because it arrived as an answer rather than an advertisement. One of those is worth more than a hundred link drops, and you do not get banned.

If your bot is for group admins, the same logic applies to admin communities. Tools like Combot and Group Help grew almost entirely this way.

Get more users from the users you already have

Everything above brings a trickle. This is the part that compounds, and it is the one most bots skip because it needs a few lines of code rather than an afternoon of submitting forms.

You already have users. Each of them can bring you another. Two mechanisms do the work:

A referral link that pays something. Telegram makes this easy, because t.me/yourbot?start=ref_12345 arrives in your handler as a /start payload you can read. Give both sides something real. A referral that rewards only the inviter gets ignored by the invitee.

A reason to vouch for you in public. This is the one people miss. A user who likes your bot will happily back it if you ask at the right moment and make it one tap. The right moment is just after your bot has done something useful for them, not when they first press Start.

Here is the shape that works, as your users see it:

If you already have daily tasks or quests, this is one more row in a list people are opening anyway. That is why it converts far better than a broadcast asking for support.

The reason this is worth doing rather than just asking is that you can verify it, so the reward is real and nobody has to send you a screenshot. Our developer API answers one question, whether a given Telegram user has backed your listing, and it is free:

import requests

KEY  = "ma_live_your_key_here"
APP  = "yourbot"
USER = 123456789

r = requests.get(
    "https://miniapps.me/api/v1/upvoted",
    params={"app": APP, "user": USER},
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"},
).json()

print(r["upvoted"])   # True or False
print(r["votes"])     # 84

When the answer is false you get a link back to send them. They tap once, and Telegram returns them to your chat so you can hand over the reward immediately. The whole loop is under twenty lines.

Being backed publicly is also how listings climb, and the most backed apps each month get posted to our channel, so the same work feeds two things at once.

What does not work

Worth saying plainly, because these all get sold as growth:

• Buying users. They open the bot once and never return. Worse, they poison the retention numbers you need in order to judge whether anything else is working.
• Buying upvotes or reviews. Any directory worth being in checks for it. We log the address behind every vote, and farmed votes get removed along with the listing that farmed them.
• Mass DMs. A fast route to a Telegram ban.
• Posting your link in every group you can find. Covered above. Costs you the groups and converts nobody.
• Waiting. No bot has ever grown because it deserved to.

Where to start

If your bot is not listed anywhere yet, that is the highest-value hour you can spend today, because it is the only item on this page that keeps working with no further effort from you.

Add your app to miniapps.me, or if it is already here, open it from your profile, paste your bot token to verify you own it, and grab an API key to build the reward loop.