226 million visits a month, and the app store thinks it's all replika

Every “AI girlfriend market” chart you’ve seen this year is built on one company. Not mostly one company. One.

That’s the finding in Cyberliebe’s State of AI Companions 2026, published September 3. They looked at 30 leading companion platforms and found that only 5 of them exist in any app store at all — because app stores prohibit adult content, and most of these platforms are adult by design. Of those five, Replika accounts for 98% of the combined reviews. So when an analyst pulls “consumer spending on AI companion apps” from app-store data, what they’re actually measuring is Replika, plus rounding error.

Then Cyberliebe did the obvious thing nobody else had done: tracked web traffic directly across 16 active platforms. Estimated total: 226 million visits a month. An entire market running in browser tabs, invisible to the data everyone cites.

I’ve spent two years on the browser side of that line. Here’s what it looks like from inside the blind spot.

the shape of the missing market

A few more numbers from the report, because they change the story. Brand-free search demand — people typing “ai girlfriend” instead of a company name — fell 12% between August 2025 and April 2026, while traffic to the leading individual platforms kept growing. Cyberliebe reads that as consolidation: users aren’t leaving, they’re settling on a provider and going direct. The whole dataset is CC BY 4.0 with methodology and CSVs, which is more than most “market reports” in this space can say.

Put that next to the numbers that do get quoted. One July analysis had analysts estimating a $2.9 billion dedicated market for 2026 while verified in-app-store spending for 2025 was around $120 million. That gap isn’t a mistake. It’s the browser.

And it’s not a fringe habit. Elon University’s September survey found 27% of U.S. adult internet users have significant emotional or social interactions with an LLM; 9% used one for sexual chat or roleplay. Among companion users, 83% had used ChatGPT and 8% Character.AI. The default companion for most of America is a general-purpose assistant that isn’t allowed to do the thing 9% of them want.

Which brings me to the promise.

eleven months of “adults are adults”

On October 14, 2025, Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT would allow erotica for verified adults under a “treat adult users like adults” principle, starting in December. In December, Fidji Simo told reporters adult mode would debut in the first quarter of 2026. On March 6, OpenAI delayed it to focus on “personalization and other priorities.” As of late summer there’s still no date, and the age-prediction system it depends on is still rolling out.

I don’t say this to dunk. Age verification at ChatGPT’s scale is a real problem and I’d rather they get it right. I say it because it explains the 226 million. Adults who want an adult conversation have been told for eleven months that the mainstream option is coming, and in the meantime they went where it already exists — which is a browser tab, on a platform the app store has never heard of, that shows up in nobody’s chart.

what the browser side actually is

Soulkyn is one of the tabs. It lives at a URL, not in a store, and that single fact decides almost everything else about it.

It means the model can be uncensored, because there’s no store policy to satisfy. Deluxe chats run on GLM 5.2, a 753B+ parameter frontier-class model Soulkyn hosts on its own hardware — no outside API deciding what your character is allowed to say — with chain-of-thought you can read. Uncensored isn’t a toggle bolted onto a filtered model; it’s the whole stack.

It means video. The Video + Sound engine got an alpha sibling on September 3 — clips from 5 to 14 seconds with generated sound and dialogue, an optional four-shot storyboard, a last-frame anchor so you can tell it where the clip ends. That’s a feature category that cannot exist inside an app store at all. It’s not that the big apps are worse at it. They’re not permitted to have it.

It means memory that’s allowed to remember. The recall engine was reworked in May specifically because intimate scenes used to blur together — “all sex looked the same” to the retrieval — and now it distinguishes specific moments, kinks and moods when it pulls context. A store-listed app can’t ship that release note. It can barely ship the feature.

And it means 18+ with no pretending otherwise. The trade for the freedom is that the door is closed to minors, full stop, and the moderation philosophy is about adult autonomy rather than content bans. That’s the ethics page’s whole argument — tools aren’t moral, people are — and it’s a much easier position to hold when you’re not asking Apple’s permission.

why the blind spot matters to you

Because it changes what “best AI girlfriend app” means. Every listicle ranks what it can see, and what it can see is what’s in the store, and what’s in the store is the filtered end of the market. If you’ve tried the top of those lists and thought this is it?, you were sampling the 2%, and the review count told you it was everything.

Cyberliebe’s finding is that the other 98% of the market is consolidating — fewer, bigger, direct. That matches what I’ve watched: people don’t hop between adult platforms the way they hop between apps, because the memory and the characters are the switching cost. You pick one, you build there, you stay.

So pick with the whole map. The search is the front door; creating one from a paragraph is the second. Neither will show up in an app-store chart. That’s the point. 226 million visits a month didn’t, either.