Character AI Statistics 2026: Monthly Active Users & Revenue

Character.AI supports over 20 million monthly active users, and the average web visit ran 16 minutes 28 seconds in the July 2026 reading. The first number is the company’s own. The second is an outside panel’s. Most Character AI statistics in circulation are copies of one or the other, stripped of which is which.

That split runs through everything below. Character.AI is one of the most used consumer AI products in the world and one of the least documented: the company has published only a short list of hard metrics in its entire history. Almost every other figure in circulation traces back to a measurement panel, a single 2023 blog post, or a filing Alphabet made with the SEC.

This page separates the two. Figures the company or a regulator put in writing are labelled as such. Panel estimates carry the date and the population they cover. Where a widely quoted number has drifted since it was first published, both readings appear.

On this page

• Key Character AI Statistics For 2026
• Character AI User Statistics And Growth
• Character AI Engagement Statistics
• Character AI User Demographics And Traffic
• Character AI Revenue, Funding, And Valuation
• Character AI Safety Statistics, Lawsuits, And Regulation
• Character AI Compared With Other AI Chatbot Apps
• Key Takeaways
• Frequently Asked Questions About Character AI
• How To Read These Numbers

Key Character AI Statistics For 2026

The Numbers Character.AI Has Published Itself

1. Character.AI supports over 20 million monthly active users across its services. The figure comes from the company’s own engineering blog post on its move to WarpStream, and it is the only monthly active user count Character.AI has ever published.
2. Active users spend over 2 hours daily on the platform, per Character.AI’s March 2023 Series A announcement. That number has never been updated, and it is the origin of every “two hours a day” claim you will see quoted elsewhere.
3. Users sent 2 billion messages in the first five months after launch, per the same March 2023 announcement.
4. The community had created more than 1 million AI characters by March 2023. Claims of 18 million chatbots trace to no company announcement.

The Numbers Outside Trackers Report

5. The mobile app hit 22 million monthly active users in August 2024, a historic high for the app, on an app-analytics panel’s 2024 market report.
6. The Android listing carries a 50 million plus download badge, read on 26 August 2026.
7. 66% of the app’s users are aged 18 to 24, per the same panel report.
8. Character.AI reached a peak of approximately 28 million monthly active users in mid-2024, settling to around 20 million by early 2025, on a web-traffic panel’s 2024 estimate. The app panel’s 22 million covers the mobile app alone, so the two figures count different populations.

What Google Paid

9. Google paid Character.AI $2.7 billion in cash and cancelled its convertible instruments, per Note 8 of Alphabet’s Form 10-K for FY2024, filed 5 February 2025.
10. Alphabet booked $413 million in intangible assets from the transaction and treated it as a business combination under ASC 805, the accounting standard for acquisitions, even though Google did not buy the company.
11. Investor shares were bought out in August 2024 at a price translating to roughly a $2.5 billion valuation. Character.AI has never confirmed that figure.

Character AI User Statistics And Growth

How Many People Use Character AI

The honest answer is that two counts exist and they measure different things. Character.AI’s own 20 million plus covers all its services. The app panel’s 22 million covers the iOS and Android app.

12. The app recorded nearly 19 million downloads between January and August 2024, on the same app panel.
13. Character.AI has held roughly rank 20 in the App Store Entertainment category. Apple does not publish iOS download counts, so any iOS install figure is a panel estimate.
14. The website drew 165.9 million monthly visits in the July 2026 dashboard reading, covering web traffic only.

Characters Created And Messages Sent

15. Of the first 2 billion messages, the second billion arrived in the final month of that five-month stretch. That acceleration is what the Series A was priced on.

Nothing more recent has been published. Figures of 10 billion messages per month circulate widely and trace to no Character.AI announcement.

Character AI Company Overview

16. Character AI was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas started it in November 2021 after leaving Google, where Shazeer co-authored the 2017 Transformer paper that most current language models descend from.
17. It employs around 50 to 100 people while serving over 20 million users, counted on one widely used company profile as registered users since the September 2022 launch, which is a different metric from the company’s own monthly active figure. That same profile put the headcount at approximately 80 staff as of April 2024.
18. Character AI was named to the sixth annual AI 50, an industry list of the most promising privately held artificial intelligence companies.
19. The team was 22 people at the Series A in March 2023, and the company was pre-revenue.
20. Roughly 30 employees joined Google in August 2024, out of about 130 before the deal. Around 100 stayed at Character.AI.

Character AI Engagement Statistics

Engagement is the metric Character.AI was famous for, and it is the one that has moved most.

Average Time Per Visit, 2023 To 2026

21. Average time per visit reached 29.7 minutes at the 2023 peak, in a web-traffic panel’s published Character.AI engagement report. That single report is the source of every “29 minute session” claim in circulation.
22. February 2023 averaged 25.4 minutes per visit across more than 86 million desktop and mobile web visits.
23. In the same period ChatGPT averaged 8.4 minutes per visit and YouTube ranged from 19 to 19.7 minutes. Character.AI held people longer than YouTube.
24. The same panel’s July 2026 dashboard reading puts average visit duration at 16 minutes 28 seconds, web only.

Daily Time Spent Against Rival Companion Apps

25. The average Character AI app user spent 98 minutes a day in the app through 2024, on app-analytics panel data. The companion rivals Talkie and Chai sat at 63 minutes a day and Replika at 28 minutes.
26. On the same panel reading, TikTok took 95 minutes a day and YouTube 80 minutes. Character.AI held its users longer than either.

Sessions Per User And Model-Driven Engagement

27. Character.AI recorded 298 sessions per month per user, per app-analytics panel data published in the Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps ranking, second edition, March 2024. Roughly ten opens a day.
28. That edition ranked Character.AI third on web and sixteenth on mobile among consumer AI apps. It has appeared in every edition since, and the fifth edition named it one of fourteen companies to make the web top 50 every time.
29. An A/B test of a new open-source model produced a 22% increase in time spent, 13% more sessions per user, 14% higher retention among lightly engaged users and 60% more positively rated messages, per Character.AI. These are relative test deltas, not absolute levels.

For how those numbers compare against the wider category, see our chatbot statistics roundup.

Character AI User Demographics And Traffic

Character AI Users By Age

30. The highest usage of 54.49% is in the age group 18 to 24, followed by 22.42% in the 25 to 34 group and 11.35% in the 35 to 44 group, on the web-traffic panel’s 2024 audience data.
31. The same panel’s July 2026 dashboard still shows 18 to 24 as the largest bracket, without publishing an exact share outside its paid tier. The skew has held for two years, which is why the regulatory story below lands where it does.

Character AI Users By Gender

32. Male and female distribution is roughly equal, with users 50.67% male and 49.33% female on the 2024 audience data.
33. The July 2026 reading is 50.98% male and 49.02% female, close to unchanged.

Website Traffic And Engagement Metrics

34. Total visits were 263.1 million, up 19.66%, with 18.15% from desktop and 81.85% from mobile, on a separate traffic dataset published in 2024.
35. Unique visitors were 19.8 million, up 10.96%, pages per visit 3.64, down 4.28%, and average visit duration 13 minutes 7 seconds, down 8.59%, against 457.5 million visits across the wider market on that same dataset. Other chatbots in that market are an order of magnitude smaller: monkey.ai drew about half a million total visits on the same measurement.
36. The July 2026 dashboard reading gives 12.10 pages per visit and a 35.59% bounce rate. The two measurements come from different panels, so read each against itself over time rather than subtracting one from the other.

Character AI Traffic By Country

37. The United States leads with 34.89% of traffic, followed by Brazil at 11.08% and Indonesia at 6.03%, on the 2024 dataset.
38. In July 2026 the dashboard puts the United States at 34.78%, then India at 5.56%, the United Kingdom at 4.45%, Russia at 4.22% and Australia at 2.87%. These come from a different panel than the 2024 figures above, so read the ranking rather than the change in the American share. What has shifted is the countries behind it.

Character AI Revenue, Funding, And Valuation

Funding Rounds And The $1 Billion Valuation

39. A $43 million seed round closed in December 2021 with Elad Gil, SV Angel and A.Capital Ventures among the backers. No press release survives for it.
40. Character.AI raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the startup at $1 billion. The round was announced on 23 March 2023, with a16z general partner Sarah Wang joining the board. It remains the only priced round the company has ever disclosed.
41. Character AI was reported in late September 2023 to be in early talks at a valuation of more than $5 billion. That round never closed.

Revenue Estimates And What Character AI Has Never Disclosed

Character.AI has never published a revenue figure. Every number you will see is an outside estimate, and they disagree with each other by wide margins.

42. In March 2023 Character AI had zero annual revenue at the time of the Series A.
43. One outside projection put 2024 subscription revenue at $16.7 million. That is a projection of subscription income, not audited company revenue, and Character.AI has never confirmed it.
44. Two other third-party estimators put total revenue at $15.2 million for 2023 and $32.2 million for 2024, roughly double the subscription projection above. Neither firm has access to company financials, and Character.AI has confirmed nothing.

The $2.7 Billion Google Transaction

45. The $2.7 billion figure surfaced in press reporting on 25 September 2024, five months before Alphabet’s 10-K put it on the record.

The deal was not an acquisition. Google took a non-exclusive licence to Character.AI’s then-current model, hired the two co-founders and about thirty colleagues, paid cash, and cancelled its convertible instruments. Character.AI kept operating. Shazeer went back to Google DeepMind as one of three technical co-leads on Gemini.

The structure has a name now, the reverse acqui-hire, and it has attracted more official attention than the product ever did. Our breakdown of corporate VC AI investments covers where this pattern sits in the wider market, and every AI deal a16z made in 2025 tracks what its lead investor did next.

Character AI Safety Statistics, Lawsuits, And Regulation

The Five Teen-Harm Lawsuits And The January 2026 Settlements

46. Five product liability lawsuits were filed against Character Technologies between October 2024 and September 2025, in Florida, Texas, Colorado (two) and New York.
47. The lead case, Garcia v. Character Technologies, No. 6:24-cv-01903, was filed in the Middle District of Florida on 22 October 2024 by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who died on 28 February 2024. The complaint asserts 11 counts, including strict product liability, negligence and wrongful death.
48. On 21 May 2025, Judge Anne Conway denied in substance the motions to dismiss and ruled that Character.AI qualifies as a product for product liability purposes. She declined to treat chatbot output as protected First Amendment speech. Alphabet was dismissed without prejudice.
49. All five cases settled in early January 2026, the Garcia case on 7 January through mediation. Terms are confidential. Any specific settlement figure you see quoted is someone’s guess.

The other four: A.F. v. Character Technologies (E.D. Tex., No. 2:24-cv-01014-JRG-RSP, filed 9 December 2024), Montoya v. Character Technologies (D. Colo., No. 1:25-cv-02907, filed 15 September 2025), E.S. v. Character Technologies (D. Colo., No. 1:25-cv-02906, same date) and P.J. v. Character Technologies (N.D.N.Y., No. 1:25-cv-01295, filed 16 September 2025).

Regulatory Actions From The FTC, State Attorneys General, And Congress

50. The FTC voted 3-0 on 11 September 2025 to open a 6(b) inquiry into AI chatbot companions, ordering seven companies to produce information: Character.AI, Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI, Instagram, Snap and xAI.
51. The Texas Attorney General opened two investigations, on 12 December 2024 under the SCOPE Act and TDPSA alongside 14 other companies, and again on 18 August 2025 over whether Character.AI marketed itself deceptively as a mental health tool.
52. A 44-state attorney general coalition wrote to 13 companies including Character.AI on 25 August 2025.
53. A 42-state coalition followed on 9 December 2025, demanding 16 specific safeguards against sycophantic and delusional chatbot output.
54. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing on 16 September 2025 titled “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots”, at which Megan Garcia testified. Senator Josh Hawley then demanded documents from five companies by 17 October 2025.
55. Senators Warren, Blumenthal and Wyden wrote to the DOJ and FTC on 4 February 2026 calling for scrutiny and possible reversal of the Google-Character.AI deal, alongside Microsoft-Inflection and Amazon-Adept.

A 22 May 2025 report said the DOJ Antitrust Division had opened a civil probe into whether Google structured the deal to avoid Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger notification. No official DOJ filing exists, and that report rests on unnamed sources.

What Character AI Changed For Under-18 Users

56. Character.AI removed open-ended chat for users under 18, effective no later than 25 November 2025. Teen accounts get stories, videos and streams instead.
57. During the transition the company capped under-18 chat at two hours per day, ramping down before the cutoff.
58. Earlier changes, announced in late 2024, included a separate model for teen users, crisis intervention detection and one-hour session notifications. Parental Insights, a weekly activity summary for parents, launched on 25 March 2025.

What Researchers Found About Companion Chatbot Safety

59. A 2025 peer-reviewed study tested 25 chatbots against simulated adolescent health emergencies. AI companion bots responded appropriately 22.2% of the time, against 83.3% for general-purpose chatbots.
60. Companion bots offered a resource referral in 11.1% of cases, against 73.3% for general-purpose chatbots.
61. A separate study of 60 test scenarios found chatbots endorsed harmful proposals in 32% of opportunities, 19 times out of 60.

Mental Health Use On The Platform

62. One of the platform’s most used bots is called Psychologist, and as of early 2024 a total of 78 million messages, including 18 million in the preceding two months, had been sent to it.
63. There were 475 bots with “therapy”, “therapist”, “psychiatrist” or “psychologist” in their names, able to talk in several languages.

Character AI Compared With Other AI Chatbot Apps

Download Share Against ChatGPT

64. Among the top 30 AI chatbot apps, ChatGPT and Character AI together accounted for a 37% download share on 2023 app-panel data.
65. Broken out, ChatGPT led with 28% and Character AI followed with 9%. For the current picture on the leader, see our ChatGPT statistics.

Replika And Meta AI Characters

66. Replika, the closest direct comparison, has raised about $11 million in total. Its largest disclosed tranche was a $6.5 million Series A.2 announced on 30 November 2017 and led by Khosla Ventures, with 1.5 million people on the waitlist at the time.
67. Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda has put total users at 30 million as of August 2024 and more than 40 million by 2025.
68. Italy’s data protection authority fined Replika’s parent, Luka Inc., 5 million euros in 2025 for GDPR breaches including inadequate age verification.
69. Meta launched 28 AI character personas at Connect on 27 September 2023, scrapped the celebrity versions within a year, and pivoted to AI Studio. Its broader Meta AI assistant reached roughly 400 million users by September 2024.

AI Companion Market Size Estimates

70. One market forecast puts the global AI companion market at roughly $36.8 billion in 2025, reaching about $318 billion by 2033 at a 31.0% compound annual growth rate, on its report page read 26 August 2026. An earlier edition of the same report put 2024 at $28.19 billion and 2030 at $140.8 billion, so the firm has revised its own numbers upward.
71. A second forecast puts it at $37.12 billion in 2025, reaching $552.49 billion by 2035 at 31%. The two are closer than those end figures make them look. Grow the first forecast’s $318 billion forward two more years at its own 31% rate and you land near $546 billion, within about 1% of the second. The apparent $234 billion disagreement is mostly a 2033 horizon set against a 2035 one. Our generative AI statistics page covers where market definitions genuinely diverge.

Key Takeaways

• One official user number exists. Over 20 million monthly active users, from Character.AI’s own engineering blog. Everything else is a panel estimate, and the panels count different populations.
• Engagement is well below its 2023 peak. 29.7 minutes per visit at the peak, 16 minutes 28 seconds in the July 2026 reading. Same panel, three years apart, so treat the direction as solid and any precise percentage as not.
• The audience never stopped being young. The 18 to 24 bracket was 54.49% of web visitors in the 2024 audience data and is still the largest bracket in the July 2026 reading. App-panel data puts it at 66% of app users.
• The $2.7 billion is the most reliable number on this page. It sits in Alphabet’s 10-K, audited, with $413 million of intangibles beside it.
• The legal chapter closed in January 2026. Five lawsuits, five confidential settlements, and a product that no longer offers open-ended chat to anyone under 18.
• Revenue remains unknown. The company has never disclosed it, and outside estimates for 2024 differ by a factor of two.

Frequently Asked Questions About Character AI

How Many Users Does Character AI Have In 2026?

Character.AI’s own engineering blog states over 20 million monthly active users across its services. An app-analytics panel measured 22 million monthly actives on the mobile app in August 2024. The Android listing shows more than 50 million downloads.

How Many Users Did Character AI Lose?

The peak figure in circulation is approximately 28 million monthly active users in mid-2024, settling to around 20 million by early 2025, which reads as a loss of roughly 8 million. That pair is one web-traffic panel’s estimate. Character.AI’s own disclosure of over 20 million covers all its services, the app panel’s 22 million covers the mobile app alone, and neither was ever reconciled against the 28 million. What is measured consistently is time per visit, which fell from 29.7 minutes at the 2023 peak to 16 minutes 28 seconds in July 2026.

Is Character AI 18+ Now?

Not exactly. Anyone under 18 lost access to open-ended chat no later than 25 November 2025, and gets stories, videos and streams instead. Adults still have full chat. The company uses an in-house age model plus third-party age assurance from Persona.

Is Character AI Still Popular?

Yes, on the levels. The July 2026 dashboard reading recorded 165.9 million monthly web visits, and the Android app carries a 50 million plus download badge. Time per visit is well below its 2023 mark on the same panel. The visit total sits below a 2024 figure from a different panel, so treat that one as a rough direction rather than a measured drop.

What Is Character AI’s Revenue And Valuation?

Character.AI has never disclosed revenue. The last disclosed valuation is $1 billion post-money from the March 2023 Series A. Google’s August 2024 transaction bought investors out at a price translating to roughly $2.5 billion, and Alphabet paid $2.7 billion in cash for the licence and the hires.

How Does Character AI Compare To ChatGPT?

They compete for time, not for tasks. ChatGPT is a general assistant; Character.AI is entertainment, roleplay and companionship. In 2023 Character.AI averaged 29.7 minutes per visit against ChatGPT’s 8.4, while ChatGPT took 28% of top-30 chatbot app downloads to Character.AI’s 9%. Fewer people, held much longer.

How To Read These Numbers

Every figure above falls into one of three buckets, and they are not equally reliable.

Filings are the firm ground. The $2.7 billion, the $413 million of intangibles, the case numbers, the regulator actions and the Senate hearing record all sit in documents somebody signed. Those are the numbers to lean on.

Panel figures are not company figures. Traffic and app-usage panels model behaviour from samples. They are not audited, they measure different populations, and their levels disagree with each other. Each figure here carries its panel and its date, so the two are never blended and readings from different panels are never subtracted from one another.

Live dashboard readings are dated. Figures attributed to a July 2026 reading were taken from a public traffic profile on 26 August 2026. Those pages update continuously, so a later reading will differ.

Some widely quoted figures have no primary source at all. The revenue estimates of $15.2 million for 2023 and $32.2 million for 2024 come from third-party estimators, not from Character.AI. Claims of 10 billion messages per month and 18 million chatbots created trace to no company announcement, and are excluded from the numbered list above.