Zeitgeist was first released on June 26, 2007 and topped the Google video charts most viewed videos. The film was translated into several languages and is distributed officially via Google Video and BitTorrent. Zeitgeist won the top award of Best Feature Documentary/Artivist Spirit at the 4th Annual Artivists Awards in 2008 in Hollywood, CA. An upcoming sequel has been announced.

A feature article in The Stranger has stated the film is based solely on anecdotal evidence,while others have criticized it for using unidentified, undated, and unsourced video news clips, voice-overs, quotes, and book citations without page numbers. In a piece entitled "Internet idiocy: the latest pandemic", an opinion piece in the Arizona Daily Wildcat refers to the film as "internet bullshit", saying that "witty sayings, fear tactics and a cool, assertive air all enable them to convince the unwitting public of their points" while another in the Irish Times called it "unhinged" and accused it of offering nothing but "surreal perversions of genuine issues and debates."

In the Gauntlet, Jordyn Marcellus wrote it was ironic that the film's viewers "have blindly followed the documentary without doing their own research." He states that, though the film is "well-edited and is truly compelling", it "glosses over inconvenient facts," uses "deceptive filmmaking" and that "for a film that rails against deception, there's a lot of deception implicit in its creation."

On March 10, 2008, director Peter Joseph removed the "Clarifications" section from the film's official site, a section which The Gauntlet believed "alluded to dishonest filmmaking tactics that would otherwise help to discredit the film." It was replaced by a Q&A Section that "attempts to smack down" the film's critics.