What this site is

Why this site exists

AI companion apps are a large and fast-growing category, and almost everything written about them is written to sell them. The comparison sites that dominate search for these terms share a set of habits: rankings that contradict their own scores, testing claims nobody could verify, invented reviewers with invented credentials, and commercial relationships buried in a footer or omitted entirely.

None of that is necessary. You can run an affiliate-funded site and still publish your rubric, show your arithmetic, name the apps you refuse to link to, and tell a reader when the margin between first and second place is 0.2 points. That is what this is.

Why the UK angle

Because nobody else does it, and because it changes the answer. Nearly every comparison site in this category is written for a US reader and then shown to everyone. The result is prices in dollars with no conversion, no mention of what UK GDPR gives you or how to use it, and no engagement with where Ofcom has actually drawn the line on the Online Safety Act for AI chatbots.

Those things matter. Whether you can complain to the ICO about a company is not a detail, and neither is a 3% non-sterling transaction fee on an annual subscription. Our rubric weights privacy and jurisdiction at 20% for exactly this reason.

How we work

• Every app is scored on the same six criteria with the same weights.
• Overall scores are calculated in code from the sub-scores, never assigned by hand.
• Every factual claim carries the date it was last checked.
• Where we cannot verify something — the operating company behind an app, for instance — we say so rather than guessing, and the app's score reflects it.
• Commercial relationships are labelled on every page where they appear.

What we are not

We are a small independent publication, not a laboratory and not a regulator. We do not run controlled trials, and we do not claim to. We are not qualified to give you advice about your mental health or your relationships, and nothing on this site should be read as if we were.

We also do not publish user reviews, ratings or testimonials. Under the DMCC Act 2024 a publisher is responsible for the authenticity of reviews it hosts, and in a category this heavily marketed we would rather not be in the business of trying to tell real ones from planted ones.

Authorship

Reviews are published under the The bestaigirlfriend.uk editorial desk rather than individual bylines. We have deliberately not invented named reviewers with fabricated job titles and credentials, which is a widespread practice in this category and one of the clearest signals that a site is not what it claims to be. Everything here is produced to the process described on the methodology page.

Corrections

Pricing, policies and ownership in this category change constantly, and some of what is on this site will be out of date before we re-check it. If you find something wrong, tell us what it is and where the correct version is published, and we will fix it and update the check date on that page.

Contact

Corrections, complaints and questions: support@bestaigirlfriend.vip