AI Companion Statistics 2026: Users, Revenue, Demographics and Risks (Sourced)

The five headline AI companion statistics for 2026

The five numbers that survive scrutiny are these: $82 million in consumer spending across companion apps in the first half of 2025, 72% of US teens who have tried an AI companion, 19% of US adults who have chatted with an AI romantic partner, 159.7 million three-month web visits to Character.AI, and an AI companion market size for 2025 that analysts put anywhere between $3.15 billion and $37.12 billion. Each comes with a date and a method, and each is expanded in its own section below.

The spending figure is the hardest of the five because it is measured rather than surveyed. Appfigures, an app-intelligence firm, counted 337 active, revenue-generating AI companion apps in July 2025, 128 of them released in 2025 alone, and put first-half 2025 revenue at $82 million, up 64% on the same period of 2024, with a full-year projection of more than $120 million. These are app-store receipts on iOS and Google Play only; web subscriptions, which is where most adult-oriented apps bill, are not in the count.

The teen figure comes from Common Sense Media’s nationally representative survey of 1,060 US teens aged 13 to 17, fielded in April and May 2025 and published on July 16, 2025. The adult figure comes from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, which surveyed 2,969 US adults through Qualtrics panels and published in February 2025. The Character.AI figure is Similarweb’s modelled estimate for June to August 2026, read on September 22, 2026. The market-size spread is discussed next, because it is the number most often quoted and least often understood.

AI companion market size: why estimates run from $3 billion to $37 billion

The market for 2025 is somewhere between $3.15 billion and $37.12 billion depending on which analyst you ask, and the measured app-store spending that underpins both is about $120 million for the year. If you take one thing from this page, take this: no single figure exists, and anyone quoting one without a definition is quoting a press release.

Here are the three tiers of estimate side by side, with what each one counts.

The gap between the first row and the other two is not an error. Appfigures counts money that changed hands in two app stores. Emergen’s figure is roughly 26 times the app-store number and Precedence’s is roughly 300 times it, because both are models whose inputs are not published and whose definition of “AI companion” is wider than a chat app; neither report lists the companies it counted. When an article says the market is “$37 billion”, it is quoting a definition, not a receipt.

Two more measured figures belong in the revenue picture. Chai, the mobile-only companion app from Chai Research, states on its own site that it reached $70 million a year in revenue in 2026 (a February 2026 figure) after more than $55 million in total funding; the page is self-reported and unaudited, but it is the only companion company I found publishing a revenue run-rate. Character.AI has raised more than $150 million in venture capital, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz, per TechCrunch’s June 2025 report on its CEO change. Neither company publishes audited accounts, so treat both as claims made by the companies about themselves.

Appfigures also documented how concentrated the money is: the top 10% of companion apps earn 89% of the category’s revenue, and only about 33 apps have ever passed $1 million in lifetime spending. For the other 300, an “AI girlfriend” app is a template with a Stripe account. That matches what I see when I test the long tail for the real monthly cost guide: the same three or four backends, different wallpaper.

How many people use AI companions, platform by platform

How many people use AI companions is a question no company answers precisely, but the sourced fragments are: 220 million lifetime downloads across the category by July 2025, 42,160,934 registered users on Replika’s homepage counter as of September 22, 2026, more than 1 million daily active users self-reported by Chai in March 2025, and “tens of millions” of monthly users at Character.AI per TechCrunch in June 2025. Downloads, registrations, daily actives and monthly actives are four different units, and the table below keeps them separate.

The table combines each platform’s own published figure (if any) with Similarweb’s August 2026 web traffic estimate, which is the only metric available for every platform on the same basis. Similarweb models web visits from panel and ISP data; it does not see in-app activity, so mobile-first apps like Talkie and Chai are under-counted here.

A few notes on reading it. Replika’s counter is the largest single number on the page and the least useful: it is a running total of accounts ever created since the app’s 2017 launch, and the press page’s last dated figure was 2.5 million in March 2018. The web-traffic column says Replika’s site gets 528.9 thousand visits a quarter, which is consistent with an app whose users live in the mobile app, not with 42 million active people. Candy.ai’s 2 minute 31 second average visit and 68.63% bounce rate look nothing like the 13 to 18 minute sessions on the roleplay platforms; a large share of that traffic is arriving from ads and leaving.

Character.AI’s ranking history gives a second angle on scale. In Andreessen Horowitz’s Top 100 consumer AI lists, built from Similarweb web visits and Sensor Tower mobile actives, Character.AI ranked #8 on both web and mobile in the March 2025 edition, #4 on web and #12 on mobile in the August 2025 edition, and appeared on both lists again in the March 2026 edition. JanitorAI sat at #25, #21 and #26 on web across the same three editions, PolyBuzz entered the mobile core list in August 2025 and ranked #42 web and #44 mobile in March 2026, and SpicyChat held #44 then #47 on web before dropping off the sixth list.

Two older Character.AI figures are worth keeping because they came from the company’s lead investor rather than a third party: in March 2023, a16z wrote that active users were spending an average of two hours a day on the platform and that 2.7 million characters had been created in five months. By August 2025 the company’s CEO described “10s of millions of Characters” on the platform. What I could not find, anywhere, is a dated monthly-active-user count from Character.AI itself, so this page does not print one.

AI girlfriend statistics: who the users are by age, gender and region

The best AI girlfriend statistics on demographics say the typical romantic-companion user is a man under 30 in the United States, but the gap is smaller than the marketing suggests: 31% of US men aged 18 to 30 have chatted with an AI romantic partner against 23% of women the same age, per the Wheatley Institute’s February 2025 survey of 2,969 adults. Among adults over 30 the figures fall to 15% of men and 10% of women. Across the whole adult sample, 19% had done it.

Age

Every dataset I opened agrees that the audience skews young. Similarweb’s August 2026 audience estimates put the largest age band at 18 to 24 for Character.AI, JanitorAI, PolyBuzz, SpicyChat, CrushOn, Talkie, Chub and Joyland, and at 25 to 34 for Candy.ai, Kindroid, Nomi and Replika. That split is not random: the 18 to 24 group clusters on free, character-library roleplay sites, and the 25 to 34 group on paid, single-companion apps with memory. TechCrunch reported that in 2024 66% of Character.AI’s users were aged 18 to 24, and Similarweb had already put about 60% of its web traffic in that bracket in 2023.

Below 18, the numbers come from surveys rather than traffic. Common Sense Media found 72% of US teens had used an AI companion and 52% were regular users, with 13% using one daily and 28% never having tried one. Pew’s larger survey of 1,458 teens, fielded September 25 to October 9, 2025, measured AI chatbots of any kind and found 64% ever use one and 30% use one daily; its February 2026 follow-up put the share who have used a chatbot for emotional support or advice at 12% and for casual conversation at 16%. In the UK, Internet Matters surveyed 1,000 children aged 9 to 17 in April and May 2025 and found 64% use AI chatbots, 9% had used character.ai and 3% had used Replika.

Gender

Gender is where the two halves of the market diverge most sharply. On the adult-oriented apps, Similarweb’s August 2026 audience estimates are 82.97% male at Candy.ai, 83.46% at Chub, 76.78% at CrushOn, 75.48% at SpicyChat, 77.1% at Nomi, 74.85% at Joyland, 69.44% at Replika and 67.92% at Kindroid. On the general roleplay platforms the split is closer to even: 51.44% male to 48.56% female at Character.AI, 62.71% to 37.29% at JanitorAI, 60.21% to 39.79% at PolyBuzz and 59.85% to 40.15% at Talkie. TechCrunch’s June 2025 report went further, stating that 72% of Character.AI’s users in 2024 were female; that is a different measure (app users, not web visitors) and a different year, and I note the disagreement rather than resolve it.

The survey data adds one more asymmetry. Appfigures found that 17% of active companion apps have “girlfriend” in the name against 4% with “boyfriend”, which is the supply side. On the demand side, Wheatley found 27% of young adult men and 12% of young adult women had viewed AI-generated pornography, and among teens, Common Sense found girls slightly more likely than boys to have tried a companion (25% of girls versus 31% of boys had never used one) and more likely to carry skills practised with an AI into real conversations (45% of girls versus 34% of boys).

Region

The United States is the largest single market for every platform in the table, but the share varies from a third to a half. Similarweb’s August 2026 country splits put the US at 32.48% of Character.AI traffic (followed by India at 6.07% and the UK at 5.33%), 38.37% of JanitorAI, 52.02% of PolyBuzz, 54.12% of Kindroid, 46.95% of Talkie, 42.29% of Replika and 33.77% of Candy.ai, where Japan (11.97%) and Germany (11.33%) are the next two. Germany appears in the top five for SpicyChat (6.19%), CrushOn (7.65%), Nomi (6.09%) and Kindroid (4.6%), which matches what I see in the Discord servers: German-speaking users are the largest non-English group on the paid companion apps.

Usage patterns: session length, spend and retention

The single most reliable usage statistic is session length, and it is long: Similarweb’s August 2026 averages are 18 minutes 33 seconds on Talkie, 17 minutes 45 seconds on JanitorAI, 15 minutes 58 seconds on Character.AI, 15 minutes 18 seconds on PolyBuzz, 15 minutes 4 seconds on Kindroid, 14 minutes 36 seconds on SpicyChat and 13 minutes 13 seconds on CrushOn. For comparison, ChatGPT’s average session fell from 8.7 minutes in March 2023 to 7 minutes in August 2023 in the same provider’s data. Companion apps hold people roughly twice as long as an assistant, per visit, and they do it with 12 to 15 pages per visit and bounce rates between 21.24% at Talkie and 40.11% at SpicyChat.

Self-reported time is higher still among people who use these apps for romance. Wheatley’s respondents who had chatted with an AI romantic partner averaged 51 minutes a week, and among young adult men in that group 37% reported more than an hour a week and 19% more than two hours. Character.AI’s investor claimed in 2023 that active users averaged two hours a day, a figure the company has not updated in public since and which I would treat as a 2023 peak rather than a current average.

On spend, the Appfigures data is the only category-wide measurement. Revenue per download rose from $0.52 in 2024 to $1.18 in 2025, which means the apps are getting better at converting installs rather than simply getting more of them; downloads still grew 88% year on year to 60 million in the first half of 2025. Chai’s self-reported numbers imply a similar story: $70 million a year across 1 million daily actives works out at roughly $70 per daily active user per year (my arithmetic, not theirs), which fits a subscription app where a minority pay. Per-platform conversion rates, churn and average revenue per paying user are not published by any company in the table; the real monthly cost guide documents what the plans cost, which is the closest a reader can get.

Retention is the biggest hole in the public record. No companion platform publishes day-30 retention, and the app-store data providers only publish it to paying clients. The closest proxies are behavioural: Common Sense found 13% of all US teens use a companion daily, Pew found 30% of teens use an AI chatbot of any kind daily and 16% several times a day, and the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI community studied by MIT researchers had grown to more than 27,000 members by September 2025. One more retention-adjacent figure deserves a flag: the Harvard Business School audit of farewell messages found 37% of goodbyes across the most-downloaded companion apps used an emotionally manipulative tactic to keep the user talking, and those tactics raised post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times in follow-up experiments. That is retention engineering, measured.

Well-being and risk: what the studies with real sample sizes found

The research does not split neatly into “good” and “bad”, and the honest summary is that light use looks harmless or mildly helpful while heavy use tracks with worse outcomes: a four-week randomized trial of 981 people found that whatever condition participants were assigned, those who voluntarily used the chatbot more reported more loneliness, more emotional dependence and less socializing. The table lists the studies I actually opened, with sample sizes, so you can weigh each one.

Three patterns run through the table. First, the positive findings come from short windows and moderate use: a week in the Harvard studies, one month or more of typical use in the Replika student sample. Second, the negative findings come from the heaviest users, whether measured as voluntary minutes in the MIT trial, hours per week in Wheatley’s survey, or the “no one else to talk to” group in the UK data. Third, none of these studies can tell you which way the arrow points. Lonely people may pick up companions, companions may make people lonelier, or both; the only randomized design here found no causal effect of the assigned condition at all, only a correlation with how much people chose to use it.

The teen findings deserve their own sentence because they drive most of the regulation below. Common Sense found half of teens distrust the information a companion gives them, yet 23% trust it “quite a bit” or “completely”, with younger teens more trusting (27% of 13 to 14-year-olds versus 20% of 15 to 17-year-olds); on the strength of its own risk assessment, the organisation recommends that no one under 18 use AI companions. Among teen users, 39% said they had transferred a skill practised with an AI into real life, which is the strongest pro-companion number in the teen data and comes from the same survey as the warnings. My guide to whether AI companion apps are safe turns this research into a checklist; this page just reports it.

Regulation snapshot: what has actually happened

As of September 2026 the concrete regulatory events are these: the US Federal Trade Commission issued compulsory information orders to seven companies on September 11, 2025, California’s companion chatbot law SB 243 was chaptered on October 13, 2025, Character.AI removed open-ended chat for under-18s by November 25, 2025, and Google and Character.AI began settling the first teen-death lawsuits in January 2026. The full state-by-state and country-by-country picture, including New York, the EU and the UK, is in the AI companion laws guide; this section carries only the dated, sourced milestones.

The FTC’s inquiry used its 6(b) authority, which compels answers without alleging wrongdoing. The orders went to Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Snap and X.AI, on a 3-0 vote, and asked how each company monetises engagement, tests for harm to minors, discloses that the chatbot is not human and handles conversation data. Notably absent from the list are the companies that dominate the traffic table above other than Character.AI; JanitorAI, SpicyChat, PolyBuzz and the adult-oriented apps were not served.

California’s SB 243 is the first US state law written specifically for companion chatbots. It requires operators to tell users clearly that the companion is artificially generated where a reasonable person might think otherwise, to maintain a published protocol for suicidal content with referrals to crisis services, to send minors a reminder every three hours that they are talking to an AI, to keep sexually explicit material away from minors, and, from July 1, 2027, to report crisis-referral counts to the state’s Office of Suicide Prevention. It carries a private right of action with damages of $1,000 per violation or actual damages, whichever is greater, plus legal fees. Every platform in the traffic table serves Californian users, so every one of them is in scope.

Character.AI’s own changes were the largest single product response. On October 29, 2025 the company said it would remove open-ended chat for users under 18 no later than November 25, 2025, starting with a two-hour daily limit that was reduced to one hour before removal, and that it would combine an in-house age-assurance model with third-party tools including Persona. The rollout began November 24, 2025, and the company partnered with ThroughLine to route teens to 1,500 helpline services across 170 countries. The lawsuit that preceded all of this was filed in October 2024 by the mother of a 14-year-old, and on January 7, 2026 TechCrunch reported that Google and Character.AI had agreed to settle that case and at least one other, with no liability admitted and terms undisclosed. Texas’s attorney general separately served civil investigative demands on Meta and Character.AI on August 18, 2025 over marketing chatbots as mental-health tools.

Outside the US, the earliest enforcement action against a companion app remains Italy’s. On February 3, 2023 the Italian data-protection authority ordered Luka, Inc. to stop processing Italian users’ data through Replika, citing the absence of any age verification and replies “absolutely inappropriate” for children, and gave the company 20 days to respond under threat of a fine of up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide turnover. The same regulator later fined Luka; the decision and its amount are covered in the laws guide, because I could not open the regulator’s decision page while writing this and will not print a figure from a secondary source.

Methodology and update policy

Every number on this page links to a document I opened on September 22, 2026, and none is rounded beyond what the source prints. The inclusion rule is simple: primary sources first (company announcements, regulator releases, bill text, court reporting), then app-store and web data providers with a stated method (Appfigures, Similarweb, Sensor Tower as relayed by a16z), then peer-reviewed or preprint studies with a stated sample size, then reputable survey organisations (Common Sense Media, Pew, the Wheatley Institute, Internet Matters, IFS/YouGov). Analyst market reports are quoted only as a range and only with the definition attached, because their inputs are not published.

Some things are deliberately missing. I did not find a dated monthly-active-user figure from Character.AI itself, so the page prints TechCrunch’s “tens of millions” and the 2023 Similarweb count instead of the round numbers that circulate. Talkie has no published user count separate from its parent company’s all-products total, and Kindroid and Nomi publish none at all. Chai’s valuation has been reported in the press, but I could not open a primary announcement, so it is not here. And the Italian fine against Replika’s developer is described without an amount for the reason given above. If you have a primary source for any of these, the contact page is the fastest route and I credit the first person who sends one.

A few figures need a specific health warning. Similarweb’s numbers are modelled estimates of web traffic, not server logs, and they miss in-app usage entirely, which is why Replika and Chai look small in the traffic table and why Talkie’s 7.2 million visits understate an app whose audience is on mobile. Company-stated figures (Replika’s counter, Chai’s revenue and daily actives, PolyBuzz’s character count) are labelled as self-reported and should be read as claims. Survey percentages carry their own margins of error; Common Sense states ±4.2 percentage points for its teen sample, and the Wheatley and IFS samples are quota-based online panels rather than probability samples. The IFS/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults under 40 in November 2024 found fewer than 1% already had an AI romantic partner while 25% believed AI could replace real romance; three months later Wheatley found 19% of adults had chatted with one. The two questions are different (“have an AI partner” versus “have chatted with one”), and that difference is the whole story of how these figures get inflated in the retelling.

The update schedule is quarterly. Similarweb figures are re-read on the 22nd of March, June, September and December and replaced, with the previous quarter’s number kept in the What changed log. Survey and study figures change only when a new edition or a new paper is published; I add studies with a stated sample size and a public method and ignore vendor surveys with neither. Regulatory milestones are added as they happen, dated to the primary document. If a source disappears behind a paywall or a broken link, the figure stays with a note until I can replace it, because a number that was true in its month does not stop being true when the page hosting it goes dark. The how we test and editorial policy pages describe the same rules for the rest of the site.