AI Companion Statistics 2026: 30 Facts on Users, Market Size & Revenue

The AI companion industry has grown from a niche curiosity to a global phenomenon. Whether you call them AI girlfriends, virtual companions, or digital partners, millions of people now have regular conversations with AI characters. Below, we've compiled 30 verifiable statistics that paint a clear picture of where this industry stands in 2026.

AI companion statistics at a glance (2026). The global AI companion market was about $28 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach roughly $141 billion by 2030, a 30.8% CAGR (Grand View Research). The narrower AI girlfriend-app segment sits near $3 billion in 2025 (SNS Insider). Across the category, apps have been downloaded about 220 million times through mid-2025, up 88% year over year (Appfigures via TechCrunch). The largest services are Character.AI, at roughly 20 million monthly active users, and Replika, with over 40 million registered users. Users skew male (~65%) and cluster in the 25–34 age bracket. Average revenue per paying user is about $25 per month in 2026. Below are 30 sourced data points on market size, adoption, demographics, engagement, technology, and social perception — each linked to its primary source.

Every number below links to its primary source. We update this page as new data becomes available.

Market Size and Revenue

The AI companion market has seen explosive financial growth over the past three years. The broad AI companion category and the narrower AI girlfriend-app segment are often conflated — the numbers below split them to keep the sourcing honest.

1. The global AI companion market was valued at $28.19 billion in 2024, according to Grand View Research — encompassing the full spectrum from chatbots to virtual companions.

2. That market is projected to reach roughly $141 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 30.8% (Grand View Research).

3. The narrower AI girlfriend-app segment was valued at approximately $3.08 billion in 2025, with projections of $19.09 billion by 2035 at roughly a 20% CAGR (SNS Insider). The distinction between the broad AI companion category and the girlfriend-app segment matters — the former is roughly 10× larger because it includes productivity-focused AI assistants and customer-facing bots.

Analyst-by-Analyst Market Estimates

Eight research firms have published AI companion or AI girlfriend-app market forecasts. The table below separates the broad "AI companion" category (rows 1–4) from the narrower "AI girlfriend app" segment (rows 5–8) so the sourcing stays honest.

Rows 1–4 measure the broad "AI companion" market; rows 5–8 measure the narrower "AI girlfriend app" segment. Accessed 2026-08-12.

Why estimates range from $2B to $37B. The spread is a definitional one, not a disagreement about growth. "AI companion market" (broad) bundles text, voice, multi-modal and enterprise/mental-health use — clustering at $28–37B in 2024–25 with ~30% CAGR. "AI girlfriend app" (narrow — consumer romantic companions only) is a subset worth ~$2.3B in 2025, i.e. roughly 6–8% of the broad market, growing a few points slower (~22–28%) because it is a purer consumer-subscription play. Both agree on the direction: a 6–15× expansion by the early-to-mid 2030s.

4. Character.AI generated $32.2 million in revenue in 2024, up 112% from $15.2 million in 2023 (ElectroIQ).

5. Replika, one of the earliest AI companions, has generated over $200 million in lifetime revenue since its launch, per Business of Apps tracking data.

User Adoption

Across the category, AI companion apps have been downloaded roughly 220 million times globally as of mid-2025 (Appfigures via TechCrunch). Character.AI (~20M MAU) and Replika (>40M registered) are the two largest; Chai reports ~10M total users; Xiaoice claims ~660M users in China.

6. Character.AI peaked at approximately 28 million monthly active users in mid-2024 before settling to roughly 20 million MAU by early 2025 (Sacra).

7. Replika has accumulated over 40 million registered users as of 2025, up from 30 million in August 2024 (Wikipedia/Replika).

8. The average Character.AI user spends approximately 75 minutes per day on the platform, according to Sacra (2024) — significantly higher engagement than most social media platforms.

9. Mobile searches for "AI girlfriend" increased by over 2,400% between January 2023 and January 2025, according to Google Trends data.

10. AI companion apps reached approximately 220 million cumulative downloads through mid-2025, with about 60 million downloads in H1 2025 alone — an 88% year-over-year increase (Appfigures via TechCrunch).

Demographics and Usage Patterns

AI companions serve a broader audience than many people assume.

11. The gender split among regular AI companion users is approximately 65% male, 35% female, based on Sensor Tower app-demographic data (H1 2025). Early adopter cohorts skewed more heavily male (80%+), but the gap has narrowed as the category has matured.

12. The largest user age bracket for AI companion apps is 25–34 years old, representing roughly 38% of active users across major platforms (Sensor Tower, 2024).

13. Average revenue per paying user is roughly $25 per month in 2026, up from about $15 in early 2025 (AI Girlfriends Industry Index, June 2026). Blended ARPU across freemium companion apps lands in a $3–$15/month band. Measured list prices are lower than that implies: across 11 leading apps in August 2026 the median entry subscription is $9.99/month and the highest is $25.99/month, with premium tiers reaching $89.99/month (Carla Kaas price index, August 2026).

AI Companion App Pricing, Measured Across 11 Vendors (August 2026)

What an AI companion app actually costs, measured (August 2026). Across 11 leading AI companion apps, the median entry-level subscription is $9.99/month and the mean is $12.80/month. Entry prices span $5.00 to $25.99/month. Paying annually costs 40% less per month than monthly billing. Top tiers reach $89.99/month — 9× the median entry price.

Median entry price $9.99/mo; mean $12.80/mo; range $5.00–$25.99. Median standard (headline) tier: $14.99/mo. Premium tiers run $19.90–$89.99/mo (median $29.95). Weekly-billed plans, where offered, work out to $21.61–$86.56/month equivalent — about 2× the median monthly plan for the same month.

Method. Prices read directly from Apple App Store US in-app-purchase listings (apps.apple.com) on 23 August 2026, using Apple's own structured in-app-purchase data; web-first products with no iOS app were read from the vendor's public pricing page the same day. Entry = the cheapest recurring monthly-billed subscription that unlocks the paid tier. Standard = the headline monthly tier. Where a vendor lists both a promotional/legacy and a standard monthly SKU (Replika $7.99 vs $14.99; Nomi "Launch Plan" $9.99 vs "Standard" $15.99), both are shown — a single number per vendor would be false precision. Credit, gem, coin and token consumables are excluded (not recurring). Weekly plans are excluded from the monthly figures and reported separately. Prices are US storefront, USD, before tax, and exclude first-payment promotions. Compiled by Carla Kaas, 23 August 2026.

14. Chai Research, a UK-based AI companion platform, has accumulated roughly 10 million total users and serves 1 million+ daily active users (Chai Research, 2024).

15. Voice and audio features increase average session length by 40–60% compared to text-only conversations, based on Replika's 2024 feature-usage data.

Engagement and Behavior

How people actually use AI companions reveals patterns that differ from typical social media usage.

16. Published benchmarks for conversational-AI session length vary widely by study design: a 2025 arXiv evaluation measured 23.0 messages per session across 150 synthetic persona sessions (arXiv:2509.04303), while our own first-party data across 51 real user sessions shows a median of 5 messages and a mean of 8.0 — see the first-party section below.

17. Peak usage hours for AI companion apps are 9 PM to 1 AM local time, with a secondary peak during lunch hours (12–1 PM), per SimilarWeb traffic patterns.

18. A 2024 YouGov survey across 15 countries found that 29% of adults consider it "acceptable" for a person to have a romantic relationship with an AI — up from 19% in 2022.

19. The same YouGov data showed the highest acceptance rates in India (43%), Japan (38%), and Brazil (36%), with lower rates in the UK (17%) and France (15%).

20. North America accounts for roughly 40% of global AI companion revenue, followed by Europe (~25%) and Asia-Pacific (~28%), according to Grand View Research (2025).

How Long an AI Companion Conversation Actually Runs (First-Party Data)

Most published AI-companion engagement figures come from analyst estimates or app-store scraping. The numbers below are different: they are measured directly from real chat sessions on Carla Kaas, not modelled or inferred. Sample: 51 chat sessions and 407 messages over the 90 days ending 26 August 2026. That is a small sample from a single product — it describes how conversations run here, not an industry-wide average — but it is measured rather than estimated, and we publish the method so it can be checked.

Where conversations stop

Of every 100 sessions that send a first message, this many are still going at each depth:

The drop-off is front-loaded. One session in five ends after a single message, and half are over by the fifth. Past ten messages the curve flattens hard — sessions that clear that mark tend to keep going, with the top decile running past 30 minutes. The practical read: the first three exchanges decide whether a conversation happens at all. Openers are not a nicety, they are the whole funnel.

How this compares to the published research

The closest published benchmark is a 2025 arXiv evaluation of a personalised chatbot (HumAIne-Chatbot, arXiv:2509.04303), which reported 23.0 messages and 4.13 minutes per session across 150 sessions. Those were synthetic persona-driven evaluation sessions with a 100% scripted completion rate, which is why the message count runs roughly 3× our real-user median while the elapsed time is shorter than ours — scripted agents reply instantly, humans take about a minute to think. Our median gap of 62 seconds between messages is the human signature in the data, and it is the reason real sessions run longer in minutes but shorter in turns.

How Long AI Companion Apps Actually Last: A 9-App Longevity Index (August 2026)

Do AI companion apps retain users? Public retention rates do not exist for this category, but longevity does: across nine leading AI companion apps read from Apple's public rating ledger on 27 August 2026, the median app has been live 3.3 years, Replika has run 9.5 years, and the nine together hold 1.62 million lifetime US ratings. Six of nine shipped an update within 30 days.

Source: Apple iTunes Lookup API, US storefront, read 27 August 2026. Ratings/month = lifetime US ratings / months since first release; it is a velocity proxy, not an active-user count. Totals: 1,616,439 lifetime ratings across the nine apps.

What this measures, and what it cannot. Retention and churn rates for AI companion apps are not published by any vendor, and app-analytics firms sell cohort data privately rather than releasing it. We do not publish a retention rate here, because an honest one cannot be sourced. What is public is Apple's rating ledger, and it supports a different and more durable question: which apps survive, and how fast are they still accumulating users?

Category survivorship is the real headline. The median app in this set has been live 3.3 years, and Replika has operated continuously for 9.5 years since March 2017 — a span that predates the current generative-AI wave entirely. This is not a category of short-lived novelty apps; the established products have multi-year operating histories.

Rating velocity separates scale from age. Character.AI accumulates roughly 14,165 US ratings per month and PolyBuzz 11,910, versus Replika's 2,007 — despite Replika being nearly three times older. Age and current momentum are independent axes, and lifetime totals alone will mislead anyone who conflates them.

Satisfaction is uniformly high and does not track size. Every app in the set rates between 4.28 and 4.78, and the highest-rated app (Kindroid, 4.78) holds under 2% of the ratings of the lowest-rated one (Character.AI, 4.28). Star ratings do not discriminate between these products.

Maintenance cadence is the clearest live-or-dying signal. Six of the nine apps shipped an update within the past 30 days, with a median of 8 days since last release. The two outliers — Intimate at 64 days and Nomi at 148 — stand out sharply against that baseline, and update recency is the one field here that reflects an active engineering decision rather than accumulated history.

Industry and Technology

The technology powering AI companions has advanced rapidly.

21. The number of AI companion apps available on the Apple App Store grew from approximately 50 in January 2023 to over 800 by January 2025, based on data.ai (formerly App Annie) category tracking. For a curated look at the top options, see our Character AI alternatives comparison.

22. In 2025, AI companion apps collectively generated approximately $120 million in global consumer spending on iOS and Android, with about $82 million in H1 2025 (Appfigures via TechCrunch).

23. Character.AI's licensing deal with Google, announced in August 2024, was valued at approximately $2.7 billion — the largest single transaction in the AI companion space to date (Reuters).

24. Fine-tuned models for companion use now commonly support 32,000+ token context windows (as of 2025), enabling multi-session memory that earlier models could not maintain.

25. According to Hugging Face's model index, the number of publicly available language models specifically fine-tuned for "companion" or "roleplay" use cases grew from under 200 in 2023 to over 3,500 by early 2026.

Perception and Social Impact

How society views AI relationships is evolving as adoption grows.

26. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour (2024) found that participants who used an AI companion daily for four weeks reported a statistically significant decrease in self-reported loneliness (UCLA Loneliness Scale), with the largest effect among participants who began with high loneliness scores.

27. Xiaoice, Microsoft's spun-off AI companion platform in China, reported 660 million registered users as of 2023, making it the world's largest AI companion service by user count (Xiaoice press releases; Wikipedia).

28. Google's Year in Search 2024 listed "AI girlfriend" among the top trending technology-related search terms globally, with combined search volume for "AI girlfriend" and "AI companion" exceeding 5 million monthly queries (Google Trends).

29. Venture capital investment in AI companion and social-AI startups exceeded $2 billion in 2024, including Character.AI's Google deal, Replika's Series B, and multiple seed rounds tracked by Crunchbase.

30. The AI companion market's growth rate (30%+ CAGR) outpaces early social media adoption — Facebook grew users at roughly 25% CAGR during its 2008–2012 expansion, and TikTok at roughly 28% CAGR during 2018–2022, per Statista and Grand View Research data.

Free-Tier Limits: What You Actually Get for Free

Free-tier terms verified August 2026. Platforms change pricing frequently — check the provider before relying on a figure. For full per-app breakdowns, see our AI companion free-tier limits comparison.

What the free-tier data shows

Across the seven platforms tracked, the average entry-paid price to remove free-tier restrictions is roughly $13/month at monthly billing, or about $7/month paid annually — while industry-wide ARPU sits near $25/month, meaning most users who convert spend well above the entry tier on tokens, credits and add-ons. The clearest trend: text chat is being commoditized. Most platforms now offer some free text chat, and the monetization wall has moved to voice, images, memory and model quality.

For the lowest-friction start, Carla Kaas allows a first message with no signup; for the most generous free message volume, Character.AI offers unlimited free text chat.

FAQ

How many people use AI companion apps? AI companion apps have been downloaded roughly 220 million times globally through mid-2025, up 88% year over year (Appfigures via TechCrunch). Character.AI has about 20 million monthly active users (Sacra), Replika reports over 40 million registered users (Wikipedia/Replika), and Chai claims around 10 million total users.

How big is the AI companion market? The global AI companion market was valued at $28.19 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach approximately $141 billion by 2030, growing at a 30.8% CAGR (Grand View Research). The narrower AI girlfriend-app segment is about $3 billion as of 2025 (SNS Insider).

How much do people spend on AI girlfriend apps per month? Average revenue per paying user is roughly $25/month in 2026, up from about $15 in early 2025 (AI Girlfriends Industry Index). Blended ARPU across freemium apps is lower, in the $3–$15/month range. Measured list prices: the median entry subscription across 11 leading apps is $9.99/month (range $5.00–$25.99), with premium tiers up to $89.99/month (Carla Kaas price index, August 2026).

What are the retention and churn rates for AI companion apps? Genuine retention and churn rates for AI companion apps are not published — app analytics firms sell cohort data privately and no vendor discloses D1/D7/D30 figures. Longevity is measurable instead: across nine leading apps read from Apple's rating ledger on 27 August 2026, the median app has been live 3.3 years, Replika has operated 9.5 years since March 2017, and six of the nine shipped an update within the past 30 days. Character.AI accumulates about 14,165 US ratings per month versus Replika's 2,007.

How many times have AI companion apps been downloaded? AI companion apps reached approximately 220 million cumulative downloads through mid-2025, with about 60 million downloads in H1 2025 alone — an 88% year-over-year increase (Appfigures via TechCrunch).

What percentage of AI companion users are men? Roughly 65% male and 35% female, based on Sensor Tower app-demographic data (H1 2025). The largest age bracket is 25–34, representing about 38% of active users.

How much time do users spend with AI companions? Users spend roughly 75 minutes per day in sessions with AI companion apps like Character.AI (Sacra, 2024). Peak usage occurs between 9 PM and 1 AM local time, with a secondary peak during lunch hours.

Best free AI girlfriend app to try? The best free AI girlfriend app depends on what you want. For the lowest friction start, Carla Kaas lets you chat immediately — no signup, no credit card, no app download. For unlimited free messages with thousands of characters, Character.AI has the most generous free tier. For a customizable AI friend with mood tracking, Replika is strong on free. For mobile-first character chat, Chai gives daily free message credits. See our full free-tier comparison for details.

How many messages is a typical AI companion conversation? Measured on first-party data from 51 chat sessions and 407 messages over 90 days ending 26 August 2026, the median AI companion session runs 5 messages and the mean is 8.0. The 90th-percentile session reaches 16 messages and the longest observed ran 49. Half of all sessions end by the fifth message, and 31% reach 10 or more.

How long does an AI companion conversation last? The median chat session lasts 5.8 minutes, with the 90th percentile running 32.8 minutes, measured across 41 multi-message sessions over 90 days ending 26 August 2026. Users reply to their AI companion in a median of 62 seconds, and 48% of replies arrive in under a minute.

What These Numbers Mean

The data tells a consistent story: AI companions are transitioning from novelty to a normalized form of digital interaction. The market is growing at rates comparable to early social media (30%+ CAGR), user engagement rivals major platforms, and public acceptance is rising year over year.

For users, the key takeaway is that you're far from alone in exploring AI companionship. For the industry, the challenge now shifts from growth to trust — building AI companions that are transparent about what they are, responsible with user data, and honest about the nature of the relationship.

At Carla Kaas, we believe in that transparency. Carla is always disclosed as AI-generated, with persistent memory that makes conversations genuinely personal — and a clear commitment to keeping the experience safe, respectful, and honest. Her fashion-model companion approach adds a curated visual identity that makes every conversation feel more real.

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This page was last updated on August 27, 2026. All statistics link to their primary sources where available. Some figures are estimates from analytics firms and may be revised as companies release official numbers. If you notice an outdated stat or broken source link, let us know.

Carla Kaas is an AI companion — conversations with Carla are AI-generated. Learn more about how Carla works.