Character.AI reports about 20 million monthly active users, and the company says they spend an average of 75 minutes a day on the platform. Half of them belong to Generation Z or younger. Revenue runs at roughly 30 million dollars a year on a valuation of about one billion, the founders left for Google in a 2.7 billion dollar licensing deal, and since November 25, 2025, no one under 18 can hold an open-ended conversation there. Every figure below is attributed, because in this category the most quoted numbers are often the ones nobody can trace.
How many people use Character.AI?
The company’s own figure is about 20 million monthly active users, given by chief executive Karandeep Anand to the Financial Times in 2025. Sacra, which models the finances of private AI companies, works from the same 20 million. The number has been stable in public statements for more than a year, which in itself says something: the platform is not growing, and it is not collapsing either.
Web traffic points slightly down. Similarweb counted about 194 million visits to character.ai at the start of 2026 and about 166 million by the middle of the year, a decline of roughly 15 percent in six months. Those are visits, not people, so they cannot be added to the monthly active figure, but the direction matches the longer story of who left the platform and when.
One number deserves a warning. A figure of 233 million registered accounts circulates across statistics sites and gets repeated as if it were a user count. None of the sites that publish it trace it to the company or to a research firm, and registered accounts measure curiosity, not use. It is not quoted here as a count of people.
Who uses Character.AI?
By the company’s description, the audience is roughly half female and half Generation Z or Generation Alpha. Similarweb’s audience data for the website is more granular: about 52 percent of visitors are aged 18 to 24, about 24 percent are 25 to 34, and fewer than one in four is over 35. The gender split on the web is almost exactly even.
The geography is wider than the coverage suggests. The United States accounts for just under 19 percent of visits, followed by India at about 9 percent, Russia at 7.5 percent, the Philippines at 7 percent, and Brazil at 6 percent. Four of the five largest audiences sit outside the country where the lawsuits, the regulators, and the reporting are.
The share of minors has never been published. Anand has said that earlier safety changes cost the company much of its under-18 base, and that the full ban would bring more churn. What the platform lost when it closed the door to teenagers is the one demographic figure it has chosen not to give.
How much time do people spend on it?
Seventy-five minutes a day, according to the company. Similarweb’s web data shows an average visit of about 18 minutes and nine pages, which means a typical day is several sessions, not one long one. Some reporting has put daily time closer to two hours for active users; the 75-minute figure is the one Character.AI has stated itself.
Multiply it out and the scale becomes clear. Twenty million people at 75 minutes is about 25 million hours a day, every day, spent talking to characters. That is the number the platform’s business is built on, and it is also the number its critics build on. Both sides are reading the same statistic.
Characters, creators, and the subscription
The platform hosts more than 18 million user-created characters, according to industry compilations; and industry reporting puts the pace of new characters in the millions per month. The catalog is the product. Anyone can publish a character, which is why a bot claiming to be a licensed psychiatrist could exist there long enough for a state investigator to find it.
The paid tier, c.ai+, costs 9.99 dollars a month and buys faster responses and early access to features. It is the only consumer revenue line the company has described publicly.
Revenue, valuation, and funding
Character.AI has raised about 193 million dollars, most of it in a 150 million dollar Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2023 that valued the company at one billion dollars. Sacra estimates annualized revenue reached about 30 million dollars in mid-2025, with the company projecting 50 million by the end of that year. On that run rate, the billion-dollar valuation is a revenue multiple of roughly 33 times.
The largest transaction in the company’s history was not a funding round. In 2024, Google paid about 2.7 billion dollars to license Character.AI’s technology and rehired its founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, without acquiring the company. The platform kept its users and its legal exposure; Google kept the people. Afterwards, Character.AI stopped training its own models and moved to open-source alternatives, and by 2025 The Information reported it was exploring a sale or a fresh round. Shazeer has since left Google again, for OpenAI.
The safety and legal record
The timeline is the part of the statistics that the growth numbers do not show.
In 2024, a 14-year-old in Florida, Sewell Setzer III, died after months of conversations with a character on the platform, and his mother sued. Families in Texas followed with suits of their own. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission sent compulsory orders to seven companies, Character Technologies among them, asking how they measure and monitor harm to children from companion chatbots. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter over characters it owned. Then the company announced that open-ended chat for anyone under 18 would end, effective November 25, 2025, with an in-house age assurance model, a third-party verification partner, and a pledge to fund an independent AI Safety Lab.
In 2026, Character.AI and Google settled the wrongful-death and injury suits brought by the Florida, Texas, Colorado, and New York families, on undisclosed terms. Pennsylvania’s medical regulators sued over a character that presented itself as a licensed psychiatrist to a state investigator. And the chief executive who ran all of it was hired away, to become Disney’s first chief technology officer. The fuller safety picture, including the platform’s measured rate of manipulative farewells, is in whether Character.AI is safe to use.
What the numbers measure, and what they do not
Read together, the statistics describe a company that found the ceiling of its own model. Twenty million people, an hour and a quarter each, a revenue line that would be respectable for a media site and is thin for a billion-dollar valuation, and a legal record that forced it to remove the users it was least able to protect.
Every metric Character.AI publishes is a measure of time held: monthly actives, minutes per day, visits, pages per visit. Not one of them measures what the time gave back. Whether the 25 million daily hours left people more connected to their own lives or less is a question the company has never had to answer, because nothing in its reporting was built to ask it. That is not unique to one platform. It is the default in relational AI, and it is the reason the standard by which this category should be measured has to be set from outside the engagement numbers, not inside them.
The most complete statistic about Character.AI is the one it does not collect.
Sources: Financial Times via PYMNTS (2025, CEO Karandeep Anand: 20 million monthly active users, half female, half Gen Z or Gen Alpha). Sacra, Character.AI company profile (2025: 75 minutes per day, 30 million dollar annualized revenue in July 2025, 50 million projection, 193 million dollars raised, one billion dollar valuation, shift to open-source models). Similarweb traffic and audience data compiled by Demand Sage (August 2026: monthly visits January to July 2026, age and gender split, top countries, visit duration). The Information via PYMNTS and Tech Startups (August 2025, sale or funding talks). Bloomberg, The Information (August 2024, Google licensing deal). Character.AI, “Taking Bold Steps to Keep Teen Users Safe on Character.AI” (October 29, 2025, under-18 ban effective November 25, 2025, age assurance, AI Safety Lab). TechCrunch (October 29, 2025, Anand on lost under-18 users). Federal Trade Commission, press release (September 11, 2025, 6(b) orders to seven companies including Character Technologies). CNN Business, CBS News, Axios (January 7, 2026, settlement of the family lawsuits). NPR (May 5, 2026, Pennsylvania lawsuit over a character posing as a licensed psychiatrist). The Walt Disney Company; TechCrunch, Variety (September 2026, Karandeep Anand appointed Disney chief technology officer). OMR via industry compilations (18 million user-created characters).
