This is the statistics page closest to home for me: AI companions are the market I research and personally test every day. Which is exactly why I can tell you the strangest thing about it upfront: engagement in this category is measured to the minute, while the market itself is measured to the nearest forty billion dollars.
The short answer: 72% of US teens have used an AI companion (52% regularly), and nearly 1 in 5 US adults have chatted with a romantic AI. Character.AI alone reports 20+ million monthly active users. The market is valued anywhere from $6.9 billion to $48 billion depending on definition, with projections reaching $318 billion by 2033, while measured consumer spending inside dedicated companion apps is a small fraction of that. Definitions matter, and this page sorts them.
As always: verified figures labeled as verified, projections labeled as projections, and every stat naming who measured it. Sources at the bottom.
Table of contents · 9 sections
AI Companions in Numbers: Editor's Choice
- →72% of US teens have used an AI companion; 52% use one regularly, and 13% daily. (Common Sense Media)
- →Nearly 1 in 5 US adults have chatted with a romantic AI, rising to 1 in 3 young men and 1 in 4 young women. (Institute for Family Studies)
- →Character.AI reports 20+ million monthly active users; companion apps have passed 220 million downloads worldwide.
- →Users aged 18–24 make up over 65% of the global AI companion audience. (Statista)
- →Companion users spend 1.5–2.7 hours a day in these apps; Character.AI’s ~92 daily minutes beats TikTok.
- →The market is projected to grow from $48 billion to $318 billion by 2033, while measured in-app consumer spending sits near $221 million cumulatively. Both numbers are real; they measure different things.
- →Peer-reviewed research found AI companions reduce loneliness about as much as talking to another person. (Journal of Consumer Research)
- →In our own survey of 2,150 U.S. adults, 56.6% say someone to talk to or feeling less lonely would be their main reason to use an AI companion, versus 10.3% for affection, romance, or sex. (AI Girlfriend Coach, 2026)
- →Current AI companion users were nearly twice as likely as never-users to say a partner's AI romance can count as cheating: 80.6% versus 44.0%. (AI Girlfriend Coach, 2026)
How big is the AI companion market, really?
Depends entirely on what you count. Here’s the honest ladder, from the hardest observed number to the biggest projection:
1. Measured consumer spending inside dedicated companion apps: about $221 million cumulative by mid-2025.
The hardest number in the category: what people verifiably paid inside companion apps. It’s growing fast, revenue in the first seven months of 2025 ran 64% ahead of 2024, but it’s three orders of magnitude below the headline market figures. Keep that gap in mind for the next three stats.
2. The dedicated companion-app market was sized at $6.93 billion in 2024, heading for $31.1 billion by 2032.
A wider ruler: this counts the whole app ecosystem around companionship, not just tracked store spending, growing at about 21% a year.
3. Broad “AI companion” market sizings run $28 billion to $48 billion for the same period, with projections up to $318 billion by 2033.
The widest rulers fold in assistants, voice AI, and companion features inside bigger products. Grand View pegs 2024 at $28.19 billion; other firms say $48 billion today and $318 billion by 2033, and one outlier says $972 billion by 2035. None of them are lying; they’re measuring different circles around the same behavior. When a market’s estimates disagree by 7×, the honest read is: enormous, young, and badly measured.
4. Venture capital has put over $2.3 billion into AI companion startups across 2024–2025.
Investors aren’t waiting for the definitions to settle. That’s more disclosed funding in two years than the entire observed in-app spend to date, times ten.
5. Revenue concentrates hard: the top 10% of companion apps collect the large majority of consumer spending.
The same power-law shape as every creator platform I’ve covered. A handful of flagship apps monetize; a long tail of thousands doesn’t, which is worth remembering every time a new companion app promises the moon.
How many people use AI companions?
More than almost anyone guesses, and youngest first.
6. 72% of US teens have used an AI companion; 52% use one regularly.
The adoption stat of the decade for this category. Nearly three in four teenagers have tried talking to an AI companion, and for over half it’s a habit, with 13% using one every day. Worth stating plainly: companion platforms are 18+ products, and this data is a big part of why regulators are circling.
7. Nearly 1 in 5 US adults have chatted with a romantic AI.
Not companions generally, romantic AI specifically. Among young adults it climbs to about 1 in 3 young men and 1 in 4 young women. Whatever your prior was for how niche this behavior is, the data says: not niche.
8. Users aged 18–24 account for over 65% of the global AI companion audience.
The category’s center of gravity is the same cohort that’s abandoning dating apps: 77% of Gen Z couples now meet offline, a twist I covered in my online dating statistics. They’re not swiping less because they talk less; the talking moved.
9. About 15% of young adults in committed relationships regularly interact with a romantic AI.
One in seven partnered young adults keeps an AI on the side, so to speak. Whether that’s harmless entertainment, rehearsal, or something a partner would mind is one of the genuinely unsettled questions of the category.
10. “Therapy and companionship” ranked as the #1 use of generative AI in 2025.
Ahead of coding, ahead of search, ahead of homework. The single most common thing humanity does with generative AI is talk to it about life. Every other number on this page is downstream of that fact.
11. Companion apps have passed 220 million downloads worldwide; the US leads with 16% of them.
A genuinely global market with an American center. Country-level adoption tracking is young, but the search-demand and download data both put the US first, which matches where the money is.
The engagement numbers
Adoption tells you who tried it. Engagement tells you what it became, and these are social-media-level numbers.
12. Character.AI reports 20+ million monthly active users, averaging about 92 minutes a day.
An hour and a half daily, longer than TikTok holds its average user. One platform, mostly under-25 users, engagement that attention engineers spend careers chasing, achieved by a chat box.
13. AI companion users overall spend 1.5 to 2.7 hours per day in these apps.
Against roughly 30 minutes for social media generally. Replika’s engaged users average toward the high end, with extreme cases far beyond. From my own testing months I’ll say the mechanism is obvious once you feel it: the other side always answers, always instantly, always about you.
14. Replika has passed 30 million registered users since 2017.
The category’s elder statesman. Registered isn’t active, its monthly active base is estimated around 2 million, but 30 million sign-ups for an AI friend predates the ChatGPT era almost entirely.
15. Companion apps have no offline hours: usage runs around the clock, with 83% of it on mobile.
Social platforms have peak times; companions get opened at 3 a.m. during insomnia, loneliness, or a bad night. That’s precisely their value and precisely the concern, depending on the user, which brings us to the research.
Why people use them, and does it work?
The motivations are measured, and so, increasingly, are the effects. Both directions of the evidence belong on this page.
16. 67% of AI companion users cite loneliness reduction as their primary motivation.
Among teens the mix is broader: entertainment (30%), curiosity about the technology (28%), and advice (18%) lead. But for adults, the honest center of this market is loneliness, which is why it deserves its own statistics page, coming later in this series.
17. Peer-reviewed research: AI companions reduce loneliness about as much as interacting with another person.
The strongest pro-companion evidence to date, across multiple studies. The mechanism the researchers isolate is feeling heard: the companion’s attention does the work, not its humanity. Notably, that’s the same thing users tell me in different words.
18. 1 in 4 Gen Z respondents called an AI companion “a meaningful relationship” in their life.
Whatever the technology is to its makers, to a quarter of its youngest users it’s a relationship. That word choice, theirs, not mine, is the cultural fact the market numbers keep underpricing.
19. The counterweight: 80% of teens still spend more time with real friends than with AI companions.
And 50% of teens say they don’t trust information or advice from AI companions. The doom narrative overstates the displacement, at least so far: for most users, the companion is an addition, not a replacement.
20. 39% of teens transfer skills practiced with AI companions to real-life situations.
Conversation starters (18%), giving advice (14%), expressing emotions (13%). There’s a defensible reading of this category as a social rehearsal space, and a worrying reading where rehearsal becomes the performance. The research honestly hasn’t settled which one dominates.
What our own AI companion survey found
Everything above this line is somebody else's number. In August 2026 I added my own: an AI relationship survey of 2,150 U.S. adults through SurveyMonkey Audience, census-balanced on age and gender. During analysis I found 441 responses that had chosen the first answer on all five attitude questions, an impossible combination, and cut them before publishing; the full account of that screen is its own post. The 1,709 that remain are the base for every figure below. They describe that sample, not the country.
24. 56.6% would use an AI companion to have someone to talk to or feel less lonely. Only 10.3% chose affection, romance, or sex.
The same conclusion as stat 16 above, measured a different way and landing in the same place: the honest center of this market is loneliness. A further 33.1% chose a mental-health reason, coping with depression or improving self-esteem, ahead of romance.
25. 50.5% say a partner's romantic or sexual relationship with an AI companion would be cheating; 71.7% would not be comfortable with it.
Stat 9 above says one in seven partnered young adults keeps a romantic AI on the side and asks whether a partner would mind. This is the answer: most would. The four answers, and who picks which, are in does an AI relationship count as cheating?
26. Current AI companion users were the strictest judges: 80.6% said a partner's AI romance can count as cheating, against 60.2% of former users and 44.0% of people who had never used one.
The opposite of what I assumed. The people closest to these apps did not dismiss them as "only a chatbot"; their single most common answer was that it becomes cheating once a partner grows attached. It is an association, not a cause, but it complicates the idea that familiarity breeds indifference. The full comparison of users and never-users is in what 422 AI companion users told us.
27. 73.0% of respondents open to feelings for an AI called a partner's AI romance cheating, versus 41.2% of those who could never have such feelings.
Believing the feelings can be real is what makes betrayal by one real. This and stat 26 are the same pattern from two angles; the feelings side is taken apart in the AI infidelity paradox.
28. 29.3% could imagine developing genuine romantic feelings for an AI, including 8.3% who could genuinely fall in love. Among current users, 82.0% were open to feelings.
The 8.3% is the firm answer; 20.9% said "maybe, if the AI became realistic enough." Experience moved this number more than any demographic: never-users sat at 14.5%.
29. 44.7% of respondents aged 30 to 45 would consider using an AI companion, versus 12.5% of those aged 18 to 29.
Read this against stat 8, where users aged 18 to 24 make up 65% of the global companion audience. Audience composition and openness are different things, and in my sample the youngest adults were the least open under 62 and the most committed to dating apps (69.6%). Openness peaked in early middle age.
30. Men were three times as likely as women to name affection or sex as their main reason: 16.0% versus 5.2%.
Conversation and loneliness led for both sexes. Women were also stricter judges: 38.0% said any AI interaction counts as cheating, against 28.2% of men.
31. 74.4% of former users would consider using an AI companion again, against 11.7% of never-users.
The retention story in one number. Quitting the app does not reset the attitude.
32. If single and seeking companionship, 52.2% would choose dating apps and 7.8% an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. 13.2% said both and 26.8% were not sure.
Human relationships remain overwhelmingly more desirable. What the survey found is not replacement but ambivalence.
33. 64.6% said an AI could never replace a human relationship in their own life. On the strict measure, 20.9% could see themselves choosing one.
The strict measure counts only the two "yes" answers; adding "maybe" gives 35.4%. State the definition every time, because this is the number most likely to be misquoted.
The privacy and safety numbers
The section where my testing life and the research overlap completely, because someone finally measured what these apps collect.
21. 4 out of 5 top AI companion apps may use your data to track you.
Surfshark’s privacy study analyzed the exact apps in my testing roster: Kindroid, Nomi, Replika, EVA, and Character.AI. Character.AI collects the most unique data types (15, with 14 used for analytics); Kindroid collects the least. That ordering matches what my own reviews weigh, and it’s why privacy is one of my six review criteria.
22. 24% of teen users have shared personal information with an AI companion, and 1 in 3 report uncomfortable interactions.
Names, locations, secrets, handed to systems that, per the stat above, mostly track their users. This is where I repeat my standing rule: these platforms are for adults, and even adults should never hand over their real name, photos, or identifying details.
23. Three seconds of audio can clone a voice; a few photos can clone a face.
The reason the rule above is not paranoia. The same generative technology that powers companions powers impersonation, an 8-million-file problem I documented in my deepfake statistics. Enjoy the technology; feed it a persona, not yourself.
This isn’t a market I watch from a distance. It’s the one I test with my own money.
Twenty-one companion platforms, twenty paid subscriptions, every screenshot from my own accounts. If the statistics above made you curious what these apps are actually like to live with, that’s the entire point of this site: the romance-focused slice of the market is broken down in my AI girlfriend statistics, and my picks for the best of them are compared on my best AI girlfriend apps page.
See the hands-on comparison →Conclusion
The AI companion statistics of 2026 describe a category that outgrew its measurement: 72% of teens have tried one, a fifth of adults have flirted with one, Character.AI holds attention longer than TikTok, and the market is worth somewhere between $221 million and $48 billion depending on whose ruler you borrow, racing toward a projected $318 billion either way.
My read, as someone inside this market daily: ignore the billion-dollar tug-of-war and watch one number, the 52% of teens using a companion regularly. Regular use at that scale means AI companionship isn’t a product category anymore; it’s becoming a default layer of social life for the next generation. The market sizings will eventually agree with each other. The behavior already has. My own survey adds the part the market numbers cannot: half of the Americans I asked already treat a partner's AI companion as a potential betrayal, and the people who use these apps are the ones most likely to say so.
FAQs
What are AI companions?
AI companions are chatbots built for ongoing personal relationships rather than tasks: friends, mentors, romantic partners, or characters that remember you, have a persistent personality, and talk with you across days and months. Character.AI, Replika, Nomi, and Kindroid are among the best-known platforms.
How many people use AI companions?
Adoption is highest among the young: 72% of US teens have used one and 52% use one regularly, users aged 18–24 make up over 65% of the global audience, and nearly 1 in 5 US adults have chatted with a romantic AI. Character.AI alone reports more than 20 million monthly active users, and companion apps have passed 220 million downloads worldwide.
What is the AI companion market size?
It depends what is counted. Measured consumer spending inside dedicated companion apps is about $221 million cumulatively; the companion-app market is sized around $6.9 billion; broad "AI companion" market estimates run $28–48 billion, with projections reaching $318 billion by 2033. All are real figures measuring different definitions of the market.
Do AI companions help with loneliness?
The best evidence says yes, with caveats: peer-reviewed research in the Journal of Consumer Research found AI companions reduce loneliness about as much as interacting with another person, driven by the feeling of being heard. At the same time, 67% of users come to them lonely, heavy use can crowd out human contact for some people, and they are not a substitute for human connection or professional support.
What did the AI Girlfriend Coach survey find about AI companions?
Our August 2026 AI relationship survey of 2,150 U.S. adults (1,709 analyzed after quality screening) found that 56.6% would use an AI companion to have someone to talk to versus 10.3% for sex or romance, 50.5% consider a partner's AI romance cheating, current users were nearly twice as likely as never-users to say so (80.6% versus 44.0%), and adults aged 30 to 45 were substantially more open to AI companions than those aged 18 to 29.
What is the best AI companion app?
It genuinely depends on what you want, deep conversation, roleplay, wholesome company, or flirtation, and the honest answer requires using them, which is what I do: I pay for and test the major companion platforms myself, with dated notes and screenshots. My side-by-side comparison of the best apps I've tested, including what each costs and who it fits, lives on my best AI girlfriend apps page.
Sources
- Common Sense Media: Teens and AI companions survey (via EdSource). edsource.org
- Institute for Family Studies: Adults and romantic AI chatbots. ifstudies.org
- De Freitas et al.: AI Companions Reduce Loneliness, Journal of Consumer Research (via Prinsessa market analysis). prinsessa.com
- Surfshark: AI companion apps data collection studies. surfshark.com
- Statista: AI companion app usage by age. statista.com
- Grand View Research: AI companion market report. grandviewresearch.com
- SNS Insider: AI companion app market. globenewswire.com
- ElectroIQ: AI companions statistics (motivations, teens, downloads). electroiq.com
- Market Clarity: AI companion engagement analysis. mktclarity.com
- Globe Market Research: Companion app downloads, spending, and Character.AI MAU. globemarketresearch.com
- Digital Connection Lab: AI companion user motivations. digitalconnectionlab.com
- AI Girlfriend Coach: AI Romance and Modern Relationships, a survey of 2,150 U.S. adults, SurveyMonkey Audience, August 26 to 27, 2026; 1,709 responses analyzed after quality screening. aigirlfriend.coach