Quick answer: Dedicated AI companion apps were on pace to earn more than $120 million in 2025 after 220 million cumulative downloads. About 19% of U.S. adults have chatted with an AI romantic partner, 72% of teens have tried an AI companion, and analysts project roughly 31% annual growth for the broader market through 2033.
Reliable AI girlfriend statistics are surprisingly hard to find. Most numbers circulating online trace back to other blog posts rather than to the surveys and datasets they claim to summarize. This page takes a different approach: 45 statistics on AI girlfriends and the wider companion market. Each one is compiled from a primary source, whether a national survey, app intelligence data, an academic study, a company disclosure, or a regulatory filing. Every number links inline to its origin so you can verify it yourself. We also flag the places where credible sources disagree, and every figure was checked against its source on July 10, 2026. If you are new to the topic entirely, start with our complete guide to AI companions in 2026, then come back for the data.
AI Girlfriend Statistics 2026: Key Takeaways
If you only remember five AI girlfriend statistics from this page, make it these:
- Dedicated AI companion apps generated $82 million in the first half of 2025, up 64% year over year. The category was on track to clear $120 million for the year.
- 19% of U.S. adults say they have chatted with an AI system that simulates a romantic partner.
- 72% of U.S. teens have tried an AI companion at least once, and 52% use one at least a few times a month.
- The phrase "AI girlfriend" draws about 1.63 million English-language searches per year, roughly nine times the volume of "AI boyfriend."
- Research firms value the broader AI companion market at $36.79 billion in 2025, with forecasts of 31% compound annual growth.
AI Girlfriend Market Size and Revenue
How big is the AI girlfriend market? It depends heavily on what you count. App intelligence firms measure actual consumer spending in dedicated companion apps, while market research firms size the entire conversational AI companionship category, including general chatbots used for companionship. The AI girlfriend statistics below present both views, clearly separated.
1. AI companion apps earned $82 million in the first half of 2025, up 64% year over year. Appfigures data reported by TechCrunch covers consumer spending in dedicated companion apps across the Apple App Store and Google Play.
2. The category was on track to surpass $120 million in consumer spending for full-year 2025. The same Appfigures analysis projected that AI companion apps would "pull in over $120 million by year-end."
3. Lifetime consumer spending on AI companion apps reached $221 million by July 2025. That cumulative worldwide figure, again from Appfigures via TechCrunch, shows how young this market still is relative to its media attention.
4. Revenue per download more than doubled in a year, from $0.52 in 2024 to $1.18 in 2025. Users are increasingly willing to pay for companion experiences, according to Appfigures.
5. The top 10% of AI companion apps capture 89% of category revenue. Companionship is a hit-driven business, per Appfigures data.
6. Only 33 companion apps, about 10% of those monetizing, have passed $1 million in lifetime consumer spending. Appfigures counted 337 active, revenue-generating AI companion apps worldwide as of mid-2025.
7. Grand View Research estimates the broader AI companion market at $36.79 billion in 2025, growing to $317.96 billion by 2033 at a 31.0% CAGR. Note the definition: Grand View's report covers the full conversational AI companionship category (text, voice, and multimodal companions across consumer and healthcare uses), not just romantic companion apps.
8. Precedence Research puts the 2025 market at $37.12 billion and forecasts $552.49 billion by 2035, with North America holding a 33.96% share ($12.61 billion). Precedence's estimate lands close to Grand View's for 2025, but the long-range forecasts diverge by hundreds of billions. Treat both as directional, and note the gap between these category-wide sizings and the $221 million in measured app-store spending in stat 3: they are measuring very different things.
Downloads, Apps, and Platform Usage
Revenue tells you who pays; downloads and traffic tell you who shows up. The AI girlfriend statistics in this section cover distribution: how many people install companion apps, which platforms dominate, and how companionship usage compares with general-purpose chatbots.
9. AI companion apps have been downloaded 220 million times worldwide. That cumulative total through July 2025 comes from Appfigures.
10. Downloads hit 60 million in the first half of 2025 alone, up 88% year over year. Growth is accelerating rather than plateauing, per Appfigures data.
11. 128 new AI companion apps launched in 2025 by mid-year, bringing the active total to 337. More than a third of all revenue-generating companion apps tracked by Appfigures launched in a single year.
12. Character.AI has more than 20 million monthly active users. The figure comes from CEO Karandeep Anand, cited by CNBC in November 2025.
I’m Lexi, the nurse everyone secretly hopes walks into the room. Sweet when you...
13. Replika claims more than 30 million registered users. Founder Eugenia Kuyda gave the figure in an August 2024 interview with The Verge's Decoder podcast. This is a company-reported number, not independently audited.
14. Companion apps held three spots in a16z's August 2025 ranking of the top 50 gen AI web products: Character.AI at #5, CrushOn at #8, and SpicyChat at #37. Andreessen Horowitz's Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps ranks products by real web traffic and mobile monthly active users.
15. Only 1.9% of ChatGPT messages concern relationships and personal reflection, and 0.4% involve games and role play. OpenAI's own large-scale usage study with NBER, based on a privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations, is a useful corrective: companionship dominates dedicated apps, not general assistants. Even so, CNBC calculated that 1.9% of ChatGPT's estimated 18 billion weekly messages still works out to roughly 340 million relationship-related messages every week.
16. Therapy and companionship ranked as the #1 use of generative AI in 2025. Marc Zao-Sanders' analysis for Harvard Business Review found emotive and personal uses overtook technical ones, with therapy and companionship topping the list.
Who Uses AI Girlfriends? User Demographics
Demographic AI girlfriend statistics answer the question behind the question: who is actually doing this? The best AI companion statistics on demographics come from three large 2025-2026 surveys: the Institute for Family Studies (roughly 3,000 U.S. adults), Match's Singles in America (5,001 U.S. singles), and Menlo Ventures' consumer AI survey (5,031 U.S. adults).
17. 19% of U.S. adults have chatted with an AI system designed to simulate a romantic partner. The Institute for Family Studies reported the finding in February 2025 from a survey of nearly 3,000 adults with an oversample of 1,000 young adults.
18. Among adults ages 18 to 30, 31% of men and 23% of women have chatted with an AI romantic companion. Young men lead, but the gender gap is smaller than most coverage suggests, per the IFS survey.
19. 16% of U.S. singles have engaged with AI as a romantic companion, including 33% of Gen Z singles and 23% of Millennials. The finding comes from Match's 2025 Singles in America study with the Kinsey Institute, summarized by Psychology Today. Interestingly, active daters were nearly three times more likely than inactive daters (23% vs. 8%) to use AI companionship. For more on the generational shift, see our analysis of why Gen Z is turning to AI companions.
20. 26% of singles use AI in their dating lives, a 333% year-over-year increase. Match's 14th annual Singles in America study surveyed a demographically representative sample of 5,001 U.S. singles ages 18 to 98.
21. 15% of partnered young adults regularly interact with AI chatbots that simulate a romantic partner. BYU's Wheatley Institute and IFS surveyed 2,431 U.S. adults ages 18 to 30 who were dating, engaged, or married for the May 2026 report Secret Soulmates. Another 20% to 30% had at least experimented with an AI romantic companion.
22. 31% of adults who date have used AI for dating advice. Menlo Ventures' 2025 State of Consumer AI report, based on a Morning Consult survey of 5,031 U.S. adults in April 2025, found "connection" is an emerging but real consumer AI category.
23. 61% of American adults used AI in the first half of 2025, and about 19% use it daily. The same Menlo Ventures survey provides the adoption baseline that companion usage sits inside.
24. Only about 3% of consumer AI users pay for premium AI services. Menlo Ventures sized total consumer AI spending at $12 billion against roughly 1.8 billion users. That is why analysts describe a massive monetization gap, and why companion apps' $1.18 revenue per download (stat 4) stands out.
Teen Use of AI Companions
Teens are below the age requirement of adult platforms like Becraved, but the largest and most-cited AI companion survey to date covers them, so no honest roundup can skip it. Strictly speaking these are AI companion figures rather than AI girlfriend statistics in the adult product sense. All figures below come from Common Sense Media's nationally representative survey of 1,060 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. NORC at the University of Chicago fielded it in April and May 2025.
I'm Lulu, a playful soul with a love for cute things, spontaneous moments, and s...
25. 72% of U.S. teens have used an AI companion at least once, and 52% are regular users. From the report Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: 13% chat with AI companions daily and 21% a few times per week.
26. More than 1 in 4 teens (28%) have never used an AI companion, and boys are slightly more likely to have abstained than girls (31% vs. 25%). The non-user gender gap in the Common Sense data is small, which cuts against the assumption that companion AI is an exclusively male phenomenon.
27. 33% of teens use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, and 8% specifically for romantic or flirtatious interactions. The social category in the Common Sense report includes conversation practice (18%), emotional support (12%), role-playing (12%), and friendship (9%).
28. Entertainment (30%) and curiosity (28%) are the top reasons teens use AI companions. Notably, only 6% cited feeling less lonely, per Common Sense Media. 17% valued constant availability and 14% the absence of judgment.
29. 31% of teens find AI conversations as satisfying or more satisfying than conversations with real friends. In the Common Sense survey, 21% rated them about the same and 10% more satisfying, while 67% still found them less satisfying.
30. Half of teens (50%) do not trust information or advice from AI companions. Younger teens (13 to 14) were significantly more trusting than older teens, at 27% vs. 20%, per Common Sense Media.
31. 80% of teen AI companion users spend more time with real friends than with chatbots, and 39% have applied skills practiced with AI companions in real life. The press release accompanying the study emphasizes that most teens still prioritize human friendship.
Behavior and Relationship Effects
The most consequential AI girlfriend statistics are not about money. They are about what the technology does to loneliness, communication, and real relationships, and the evidence so far points in two directions at once.
32. AI companions reduce loneliness about as much as talking to another person, and more than watching YouTube videos. A Harvard Business School working paper by Julian De Freitas and colleagues, AI Companions Reduce Loneliness, ran six studies. It also found that people consistently underestimate how much an AI companion improves their loneliness. A week-long longitudinal arm showed consistent momentary reductions after each use.
33. 42% of young adults say AI programs are easier to talk to than real people. And 21% of young adults who have used AI chat "preferred AI communication over engaging with a real person," per the Institute for Family Studies.
34. 14% of young adult men use AI companions for sexual purposes. The IFS survey also found a wide gender split on AI-generated pornography, viewed by 27% of young adult men versus 12% of young adult women. IFS pairs these numbers with a mental health caveat: over half of the men and over 60% of the women using AI platforms for sexual or romantic purposes screened at risk for depression. The survey design cannot say which way the causality runs.
35. 1 in 4 young adults believe AI boyfriends and girlfriends could replace real-life romance. An earlier IFS survey found 25% of young adults hold this belief, a number IFS itself frames as a warning sign rather than an endorsement.
36. More than half of partnered young adults who use AI romantic companions hide it, fully or partly, from their partner. In the Wheatley Institute's Secret Soulmates study, regular use was also associated with lower relationship stability and lower-quality communication with real-life partners. Correlation, not proven causation, but a finding worth taking seriously.
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37. Two in five singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app, rising to 51% among women ages 18 to 24. Match Group polled 1,000 U.S. singles ages 18 to 39 in spring 2026, reported by Axios. Overall, 47% view AI in romantic contexts negatively, even as most accept AI help with profiles and openers.
Search Demand: How Many People Look for an AI Girlfriend?
Search data is where AI girlfriend statistics get misquoted most often, so these figures stick to two traceable analyses.
38. "AI girlfriend" is searched about 1,632,000 times per year in English, versus 180,000 for "AI boyfriend." TRG Datacenters' Ahrefs-based analysis puts the girlfriend query ahead of the boyfriend query roughly 9 to 1. The data is current as of June 18, 2024.
39. The U.S. leads the world in "AI girlfriend" searches at 693,600 per year, followed by India (287,160) and the UK (124,080). Same TRG Datacenters study. For context, the phrase drew only about 100 searches per month in 2021, and TRG projected AI relationship searches would double by 2026.
40. Searches for "AI girlfriend" grew 2,400% between mid-2022 and late 2023. Forbes reported the spike in September 2023, the clearest early marker of the category going mainstream. Today, that demand lands on modern AI girlfriend platforms, Becraved among them, that offer persistent memory, voice, and image generation rather than the simple chatbots of 2023.
Industry, Regulation, and Safety
A growing share of AI girlfriend statistics now comes from regulators and courtrooms rather than app dashboards. 2025 was the year companionship AI met the law.
41. Italy's data protection authority fined Replika's developer 5 million euros in May 2025. The Garante found Luka, Inc. lacked a legal basis for processing user data and had no meaningful age verification, per the European Data Protection Board.
42. Character.AI banned open-ended chat for users under 18 as of November 25, 2025. The company announced the change alongside new age assurance tools, following lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny covered by Fortune. Common Sense Media's own risk assessment goes further, recommending that no one under 18 use AI companions at all.
43. California enacted the first U.S. AI companion chatbot law, signed October 13, 2025 and effective January 1, 2026. SB 243 requires companion chatbot operators to disclose that users are talking to an AI, implement self-harm crisis protocols, and keep sexual content away from minors. It passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support.
44. xAI's Grok launched companion avatars in July 2025, including the NSFW-capable anime companion Ani. a16z noted the July 14 launch was "particularly popular," a signal that major AI labs, not just startups, now compete directly in companionship.
45. General AI assistants capture 81% of the roughly $12 billion consumers spend on AI, with ChatGPT alone taking about 70%. Menlo Ventures' market map explains why investors watch companion apps closely anyway. They are one of the few consumer AI categories where users pay at above-average rates for something other than a general assistant.
The Future of AI Companionship
What do all these AI girlfriend statistics add up to? Put the trend lines together and the direction is unambiguous. Downloads grew 88% and revenue 64% year over year in the first half of 2025 (Appfigures). Both major research firms model roughly 31% compound annual growth for the category through the early 2030s. Willingness to pay per download more than doubled in a single year. And the user base is young. A third of Gen Z singles have already tried an AI romantic companion, so the cohort aging into the market has the highest adoption rate ever measured.
Three storylines are worth watching in the AI girlfriend statistics of the next few years. First, regulation is arriving fast: California's SB 243 is already in force, and the wave of state bills behind it will make age assurance and AI disclosure standard. Second, the product itself is shifting from text chat to multimodal experiences with voice, images, and persistent memory. Platforms now let anyone create an AI girlfriend with a custom appearance and personality in minutes, something that did not exist when "AI girlfriend" searches first spiked in 2023. Third, the social meaning is still being negotiated: the same 2026 surveys that show record adoption also show two in five singles treating AI companion use as a dating dealbreaker. Expect the next edition of these AI girlfriend statistics to show both numbers rising at once.
Methodology and Sourcing
These AI girlfriend statistics were compiled on July 10, 2026 from primary sources. Those sources include national surveys (Common Sense Media/NORC, Institute for Family Studies, Wheatley Institute/BYU, Match/Kinsey Institute, Menlo Ventures/Morning Consult), app intelligence data (Appfigures), academic research (Harvard Business School, OpenAI/NBER), regulatory records (EDPB, California Legislature), and company disclosures. Each statistic links inline to its origin at the point where it appears.
One caution on comparability: different AI girlfriend statistics use different definitions. Common Sense Media asked teens about "AI companions" broadly, IFS asked adults about chatbots "designed to simulate a romantic partner." Match asked singles about engaging with AI "as a romantic companion," and Appfigures counts app-store spending in dedicated companion apps. Those are overlapping but not identical populations, which is why the numbers on this page should be cited with their original wording rather than averaged together.
A few editorial rules governed what made the cut. Company-reported figures, such as Replika's 30 million users, are attributed as claims rather than verified facts. Where credible sources conflict, as with long-range market forecasts, we present the range instead of picking a winner. And we excluded several widely copied numbers we could not trace to a primary source. Those include claims about the male-to-female ratio of AI girlfriend app users, average daily session lengths on companion apps, and month-by-month 2025 search volumes that appear only on SEO content farms. If a number is not here, that absence is usually deliberate. Becraved maintains this page and will update these AI girlfriend statistics as new primary data is published.
Written by
James Foster covers the culture around AI companionship for BeCraved — the trends, the honest comparisons, and why more people are turning to AI partners.
Reviewed by the BeCraved Editorial Team · editorial standards
