Sourced data
AI Companion Statistics 2026
The numbers behind the AI girlfriend and companion boom — market size, downloads, revenue, who uses these apps, how stickily, and what the research says about loneliness. Every figure links to its source.
Last updated July 2026. Free to cite or reference with attribution to CompanionRater. Where market-research firms disagree, we show the range and name each publisher rather than pick one figure.
Market size
Estimates vary widely because research firms define the category differently — 'AI girlfriend apps' is a far narrower slice than 'AI companions' broadly. Treat these as a sourced range, not one number.
AI girlfriend app market, 2024 → 2034 (CAGR ~24.7%)
Broad 'AI companion' market, 2024 → 2030 (CAGR ~30.8%) — a much wider definition spanning voice, multimodal and enterprise
AI girlfriend app market, 2024 → 2032 (CAGR ~20%)
Downloads & revenue
The hardest numbers in the category, from app-store intelligence firms. Note that these cover the App Store and Google Play only — the web-billed platforms are invisible here (see the note below).
spent inside romantic and NSFW AI companion apps in the first half of 2026, across 214 apps
We checked the apps behind this number and found at least one — ChatBox, at $13M — is a general-purpose productivity assistant with no companion features, so the true figure is nearer $150M. See the leaderboard below.
spent in the same six months on 'PG' general-purpose companion apps — a near-identical figure, making the category roughly $328M per half-year on mobile
all-time consumer spending on romantic and NSFW companion apps since late 2022, on 165.3M downloads
38% of that all-time total was earned in the first six months of 2026 alone — the clearest single measure of how fast the category is compounding.
what the whole category was on track to earn across all of 2025 (+64% YoY), for comparison
Not a clean like-for-like: Appfigures widened its coverage and split the category into romantic and PG buckets for 2026. Directionally, mobile spending roughly tripled.
cumulative downloads of AI companion apps as of mid-2025, after +88% year-over-year growth in the first half of that year
of all category revenue captured by the top 10% of apps — a winner-take-most market
Who is actually earning it
The mobile leaderboard looks nothing like the press coverage. Replika and Character.AI get the headlines; these are the apps taking the money in the first half of 2026. We verified the publisher behind each one from its store listing — Zeta is South Korean, Tipsy Chat Singaporean, Crushie and Emochi American.
Zeta — the highest-grossing romantic companion app of H1 2026, on 3M installs
Tipsy Chat: Live Your Story — second by gross revenue
ChatBox — listed third, but we checked and it is not a companion app at all
Appfigures placed 'ChatBox: AI Chat Bot Assistant' third in the romantic and NSFW bucket. Its App Store listing (seller FLORATE LIMITED) is a general-purpose multi-model assistant for GPT-5, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek, filed under Productivity, rated 13+, sold by weekly and yearly subscription rather than gems, with no characters, personas, roleplay or romance anywhere in its description. We believe it was swept into the category by keyword matching. Treat the $162.8M headline as roughly $13M too high.
installs of Emochi, the most-downloaded romantic companion app of H1 2026 — though it ranked only fifth by revenue ($7.5M)
Where the spending comes from
of global consumer spend on AI companion apps came from the United States
Measured across Jan 2023 – Dec 2024, the most recent country-level breakdown published for the category.
from India — the second-largest market by consumer spend, ahead of every European country
from Brazil, the third-largest market
Users & traffic
Character.AI monthly active users (2026), down from a ~28M peak in mid-2024
registered Replika users (grew from ~10M in 2023 to 30M+ in 2024)
monthly visits to Candy AI (April 2026), average session ~6m25s
Traffic measured by Similarweb; the app's '50M registered users' is a marketing claim.
Engagement
Why investors care: companion apps are extraordinarily sticky.
Character.AI's session length vs ChatGPT (25.4 vs 8.4 minutes) — the stat that put it on the map
sessions per user per month on Character.AI, versus 74 for the next-stickiest companion app
Who uses them — and how much they pay
of US adults have chatted with an AI romantic partner; among young men 18–30 it's 31%
young adults believe AI partners could one day replace real-life romance
rise in revenue per download (from $0.52 to $1.18) between 2024 and 2025
Loneliness & wellbeing research
The evidence genuinely cuts both ways — which is exactly why it's worth citing carefully.
with talking to another person: a Harvard Business School study found companions measurably reduced loneliness
a large MIT Media Lab + OpenAI study linked heavier daily chatbot use to higher loneliness and emotional dependence (correlational)
of US teens (13–17) have used an AI companion; ~52% use one regularly
A note on the numbers
Market-size forecasts for this category disagree by roughly 10× because firms define “AI companion” differently — some count only AI-girlfriend apps, others include voice assistants, multimodal agents, and enterprise uses. We present a sourced range and attribute every figure. User and engagement metrics drawn from app-intelligence firms (Similarweb, Sensor Tower, Appfigures) are more reliable than self-reported “registered user” marketing claims, which we flag where they appear.
One blind spot is worth stating plainly: app-store data cannot see the web. Platforms billed by card or crypto through a browser — Candy AI, Janitor AI, DreamGF, Muah and most of the explicit end of the category — appear in none of the revenue figures above, precisely because Apple and Google will not host that content. Traffic estimates for those sites are measurable; their revenue is not. Any figure you see quoted for a web-only platform’s ARR traces back to traffic-times-guesswork, and we do not publish those numbers.
Want the safety side of the picture? See our AI Companion Privacy Report.
FAQ
How big is the AI companion market?
It depends entirely on whether you mean money people have actually spent or money analysts forecast. Observed spending inside mobile companion apps was about $328 million in the first half of 2026 — $162.8 million on romantic and NSFW apps and $164.8 million on general-purpose ones. Analyst forecasts for an 'AI girlfriend app market' put it near $2.9 billion for 2026, and broader 'AI companion' forecasts run to $28 billion and beyond. Those forecasts disagree with each other by roughly 10x and sit an order of magnitude above anything measurable, so we lead with the observed figures.
How fast is the AI companion market growing?
Fast, and accelerating on the monetisation side more than the user side. Romantic and NSFW companion apps have taken $427.3 million in total since late 2022 — but 38% of that arrived in the first half of 2026 alone. Revenue per download more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, from $0.52 to $1.18, meaning the growth is coming as much from users converting to paid as from new users arriving.
How many people use AI companion apps?
AI companion apps had passed roughly 220 million cumulative downloads by mid-2025, with first-half 2025 downloads up 88% year over year; the romantic and NSFW slice alone accounts for 165.3 million downloads since late 2022. Among individual apps, Character.AI has around 20 million monthly active users and Replika reports 40 million-plus registered users.
Which AI companion apps make the most money?
On mobile in the first half of 2026, Zeta led the romantic category with $33 million in gross revenue, followed by Tipsy Chat ($15.2 million), Crushie AI ($8.8 million) and Emochi ($7.5 million). Emochi was the most downloaded at 7.9 million installs. A fifth app, ChatBox, was listed third at $13 million, but we checked its store listing and it is a general-purpose productivity assistant with no companion features — so we exclude it. Notably, none of the real leaders are the apps that dominate press coverage, and the list excludes web-billed platforms like Candy AI, which app-store data cannot see at all.
Do AI companions make loneliness better or worse?
The research cuts both ways. A Harvard Business School study found companions reduced loneliness about as much as talking to another person, while a large MIT Media Lab and OpenAI study linked heavier daily chatbot use to higher loneliness and emotional dependence. The MIT finding is correlational, not proof of cause.
Sources
- Common Sense Media — Nearly 3 in 4 teens have used AI companions (Jul 2025)
- MIT Media Lab + OpenAI — Heavier chatbot use linked to more loneliness (RCT) (Mar 2025)
- Harvard Business School — AI companions reduce loneliness (Working Paper 24-078) (Jun 2024)
- Wheatley Institute / IFS — Counterfeit Connections: the rise of AI romantic companions (Feb 2025)
- TechCrunch / Appfigures — AI companion apps on track to pull in $120M in 2025 (Aug 2025)
- Decrypt / Appfigures — How much your boyfriend is spending on AI girlfriends (Appfigures data) (Jul 2026)
- Apple App Store — ChatBox AI — Chatbot Assistant (App Store listing, FLORATE LIMITED) (Jul 2026)
- Statista / Appfigures — Top markets for AI companion apps (2025)
- Similarweb — Character.AI engagement vs ChatGPT (Mar 2023)
- DemandSage — Character.AI Statistics (Similarweb data) (2026)
- Andreessen Horowitz — Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps (2024)
- Fortune — Replika user numbers (CEO statements) (2023)
- Market.us — AI Girlfriend App Market (2025)
- Grand View Research — AI Companion Market Size & Trends (2025)
- SNS Insider — AI Girlfriend App Market (2025)