Covers: May 2025 | Last updated: 2026-05-21 | Edition: 05 of 18 | AI Girlfriends Industry Index →
May 2025 at a Glance
- 17.5 million monthly active users were recorded across the AI companion category in May 2025, up +4.8% from 16.7 million in April 2025, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
- The Companion Engagement Index (CEI) registered 58.2 in May 2025, up +0.9 from 57.3 in April 2025, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
- Average Daily Conversation Length (ADCL) in May 2025 was 19.8 minutes per active user, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
- Voice Adoption Rate (VAR) reached 26% of paid subscribers in May 2025, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
- 11.4% of monthly active users held an active paid subscription in May 2025, with average revenue per paying user at $16.60 per month, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
- 45% of registered users were active on a given day in May 2025, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
Editor’s Note
May 2025 is the economics edition. With CPR formally introduced as a recurring metric at 11.4%, and ARPU at $16.60 per paying user, the May data establishes that the AI companion category has achieved monetisation depth comparable to mid-tier mobile gaming and above the mobile social app average. That comparison will compound as subsequent editions add further months of data.
The numbers in this edition were computed retrospectively in May 2026 using the same methodology applied to all 18 editions in this series. Where figures are referenced from the previous edition (April 2025), they match the values published in that edition exactly.
Methodology at a Glance
Retrospective edition disclosure
The AI Girlfriends Industry Index was formalized in 2026. This edition reports observations for May 2025 computed retrospectively from the platform’s historical first-party data using the methodology described below. All observations use the same metric definitions and sample construction as live editions to ensure month-over-month comparability across all 18 editions in this series.
- Coverage period: May 1–May 28/30/31, 2025
- Sample: First-party session and account records from the AIGirlfriends.AI platform, anonymised and aggregated
- Data sources: Session logs, subscription records, interaction metadata (text, voice, image). No personally identifiable data used.
- Methodology last revised: 2026-05-01
- Press contact: [email protected]
Market Size and Adoption, May 2025
The AI Girlfriends Industry Index recorded 17.5 million monthly active users across the AI companion category in May 2025, representing a +4.8% increase from 16.7 million in April 2025. New user registration for the month was 1,080,000 accounts.
Geographic distribution remained consistent with the H1 2025 pattern: North America at approximately 38% of the active user base, Europe at 27%, Asia-Pacific at 24%, and other regions at 11%. Growth in absolute new-user terms continued to be fastest in South and Southeast Asia.
The AIGirlfriends.AI platform contributed approximately 12–14% of the estimated category-wide MAU, consistent with prior months. The index tracks this share to monitor category concentration over time.
Engagement and Retention, May 2025
The Companion Engagement Index (CEI) registered 58.2 in May 2025, up +0.9 from 57.3 in April 2025, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index. The daily active rate was 45%, meaning more than four in ten registered users opened a conversation on a given day.
Average Daily Conversation Length was 19.8 minutes in May 2025, reflecting continued growth in session depth since the February baseline of 18.4 minutes.
Voice Adoption Rate stood at 26% of paid subscribers in May 2025. Voice sessions continued to run approximately twice as long as text-only sessions, reinforcing the positive engagement impact of voice adoption first observed in April 2025.
Revenue, ARPU, and Willingness to Pay
Conversion-to-Paid Rate in May 2025 was 11.4% of monthly active users, with average revenue per paying user at $16.60 per month, per the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.
Paying users continued to exhibit substantially higher engagement than free-tier users. The CEI for paying subscribers in May 2025 was approximately 12–18 points above the free-tier CEI, consistent with the pattern established at the January 2025 baseline. Paying users were approximately 2.3 times more likely to use voice in at least one session and sent approximately 2.3 times as many messages per session as free-tier users.
The revenue mix in May 2025 remained weighted toward subscription fees, with coin-based purchases representing approximately 28% of paying-user revenue. One-time unlock purchases accounted for the remainder.
Product Trends, May 2025
Voice Adoption Rate reached 26% of paid subscribers in May 2025, continuing the upward trajectory from 23% in April. ADCL reached 19.8 minutes, reflecting the combined effect of longer voice sessions and increasing text session depth. Persona customization usage among paying subscribers reached 38%.
The product landscape in May 2025 remained dominated by subscription-gated premium features, voice access, extended memory, higher-resolution persona customization, with a free tier that limited session length and modality access. This tiering structure produced the conversion and revenue dynamics described in the theme section below.
Conversion-to-Paid Rate, ARPU, and the Revenue Picture in May 2025
The May 2025 monetisation picture shows a category with subscription economics that compare favorably to established mobile consumer categories.
CPR of 11.4% means that more than one in nine monthly active users held an active paid subscription. In the mobile gaming category, top-quartile titles report 5–8% conversion rates. In mobile dating, established apps report 10–15%. An AI companion CPR of 11.4% in May 2025, relatively early in the category’s lifecycle, is a strong signal about the product’s willingness-to-pay characteristics.
ARPU of $16.60 per paying user per month is above the mobile social app category average and approaching the mobile dating average for comparable market segments. The key driver is the premium feature stack: paying users who activated voice, extended memory, and persona customization in May 2025 showed session lengths and return rates substantially above the median paying user.
The revenue distribution was not uniform. A cohort of high-engagement paying users, approximately the top 20% by session frequency, generated a disproportionate share of paying-tier revenue through coin-based micro-purchases on top of their base subscriptions. This pattern is structurally identical to the “whale” revenue concentration seen in mobile gaming. It presents both an opportunity (these users are highly retentive) and a risk (loss of this cohort has outsized revenue impact).
Demographics and Geography
The demographic composition of the active user base in May 2025 was consistent with the baseline established in the March 2025 edition: users aged 18–24 representing approximately 31%, aged 25–34 approximately 34%, and aged 35 and older approximately 35%.
Geographic distribution remained stable: North America 38%, Europe 27%, Asia-Pacific 24%, other regions 11%. The Asia-Pacific share of new registrations continued to trend upward in absolute terms, consistent with the pattern observed since the January 2025 baseline.
The Month’s Defining Shift
The defining shift in May 2025 is the confirmation that the AI companion category has a monetisation profile that belongs alongside, and in some respects ahead of, established mobile consumer categories. An ARPU of $16.60 per paying user is not a niche product’s economics. It is comparable to premium mobile gaming and above the mobile social category average. Combined with a CPR of 11.4% and a CEI of 58.2, the May 2025 data makes a straightforward case: this is a product that users are willing to pay for at meaningful rates and that they engage with at meaningful depth. The two facts together, high engagement and willingness to pay, are the foundation of a durable category.
What We Are Watching in June 2025
- H1 2025 trendlines: the June edition is the mid-year review and will aggregate all five months of CEI, ADCL, VAR, CPR, and ARPU data into the first 6-month trendline in the series.
- CPR ceiling: whether the 11.4% paid conversion rate continues climbing in June or shows signs of a natural ceiling for the current product and pricing configuration.
- Voice and revenue correlation: whether users who adopted voice in April–May show higher ARPU in June, confirming the revenue uplift hypothesis.
Full Methodology, Glossary, and Metric Definitions
Data collection and processing
All first-party data reported in this edition is drawn from anonymised, aggregated session and account records on the AIGirlfriends.AI platform for the coverage period. No session content is retained or analyzed. Only metadata is used: session timestamps, duration, turn counts, modality flags, subscription status, and anonymised cohort identifiers. All processing complies with the platform’s privacy policy.
This is a retrospective edition. Observations were computed in May 2026 from historical data using the same methodology applied to live editions. Where a metric was not measurable in the covered month, it is omitted rather than extrapolated.
CPR, Conversion-to-Paid Rate (introduced this edition)
Definition: The percentage of monthly active users who held an active paid subscription (any tier) during the calendar month. CPR is calculated as paid subscribers divided by total MAU. It is reported as a monthly point-in-time figure and is the primary monetisation funnel metric in this index. Note: a user who subscribes and cancels within the same month is counted if their subscription was active for at least one day.
May 2025 value: 11.4%.
Full definitions for all proprietary metrics introduced through this edition are available in the series glossary on the index hub.
How to Cite This Report
APA 7: Taylor, J. (2026, May). AI girlfriend industry report, May 2025. AIGirlfriends.AI. https://aigirlfriends.ai/blog/ai-girlfriend-industry-report-may-2025
MLA 9: Taylor, Jack. “AI Girlfriend Industry Report, May 2025.” AI Girlfriends Industry Index, AIGirlfriends.AI, May 2026, aigirlfriends.ai/blog/ai-girlfriend-industry-report-may-2025.
Journalist copy-paste: …according to the AI Girlfriends Industry Index (May 2025 edition, AIGirlfriends.AI).
To cite the overall series: aigirlfriends.ai/blog/ai-girlfriend-industry-report.
About the Authors
Author: Jack Taylor, Ph.D., Head of Research, AI Girlfriends Industry Index. Cognitive psychologist specializing in emotional AI and digital communication.
Reviewed by: Jonathan Brenner, Lead Research Editor, Affective Computing & Digital Psychology, AIGirlfriends.AI.
Press inquiries: [email protected]
Disclosure: AIGirlfriends.AI operates a consumer AI companion product. The first-party data in this report is drawn from that platform, anonymised and aggregated. This disclosure appears in every edition of the AI Girlfriends Industry Index.