How many people have AI girlfriends? Surveys, app numbers and who uses them

The main surveys

The Secret Soulmates report also cites a Gallup survey of 2,500 young adults, published by Harvard Business Review, in which 1 in 10 people aged 18 to 28 said they had used an AI chatbot as a girlfriend or boyfriend in the last month.

Tried one vs in a relationship: why the numbers differ

The surveys ask different questions. "Have you ever chatted with an AI romantic partner?" catches anyone who tried an app once. "Do you have a romantic relationship with an AI?" catches only the committed. The YouGov question is the strictest, and its full answers show how few people see an AI as a partner:

• I already have: 1%
• Definitely could: 2%
• Probably could: 3%
• Probably not: 8%
• Definitely not: 81%
• Not sure: 5%

A sensible reading of all the data: roughly one in five adults has tried an AI girlfriend or boyfriend, somewhere around one in ten young adults uses one regularly, and about one in a hundred adults calls it a relationship.

By age and gender

Age is the biggest divide. In the Wheatley Institute data, 31% of men and 23% of women aged 18 to 30 had chatted with an AI romantic partner, against 15% of men and 10% of women over 30. Match found the same slope: 33% of Gen Z singles and 23% of millennials had engaged with AI as a romantic companion.

Men use them more, but the gap is smaller than many assume. Among partnered young adults, the 2026 report found men were about 5 percentage points more likely than women to engage with an AI companion, and over 10% of women in committed relationships chatted or roleplayed with one regularly. AI boyfriend communities are sizable too: MIT researchers studied r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a Reddit group of more than 27,000 members. Our comparison of AI girlfriends vs AI boyfriends covers the gender split in detail.

What app numbers show

Company and app store figures give a sense of scale, though they count accounts and downloads, not people in relationships:

• Replika's homepage claims 42,160,934 users worldwide.
• Character.AI, a general character chat app rather than a girlfriend app, has 20 million monthly active users, according to TechCrunch.
• Appfigures counted 337 revenue-generating AI companion apps and 220 million lifetime downloads by mid-2025.
• Romance and 18+ companion apps alone have had 165.3 million downloads since late 2022.

These numbers undercount. Most AI girlfriend services run in the browser, not through app stores: of the 31 apps we track, only 3 have a native iPhone app and 5 a native Android app, so their users never show up in download data. Our AI girlfriend statistics page collects the market figures in one place.

How many people pay

Paying users are a smaller group again. Appfigures found AI companion apps took $82 million in the first half of 2025, with revenue per download of $1.18, and that the top 10% of apps earned 89% of the revenue. In other words, most downloads never turn into a subscription, and a few apps take most of the money.

For those who pay, the cost is modest per month but adds up. The median cheapest plan across the apps we track is $7.75 a month and the median month-to-month price is $14.99. Our guide to how AI girlfriend apps make money explains subscriptions, tokens and upsells.

Teens and AI companions

The most surprising number is for teenagers. Common Sense Media found that 72% of US teens aged 13 to 17 have used AI companions at least once, over half use them at least a few times a month, and about one in three use them for social interaction and relationships, including romantic roleplay.

Every app we track is for adults only, and Common Sense Media recommends that no one under 18 use AI companions. Our guide to AI girlfriend apps and teens covers age checks and what parents can do.