Trends
Two years ago, 170 people a month searched for "ai addiction" in the US. As of July 2026 it is 1,000, up 488% over two years. Every article you will read about this frames it as an escalating alarm.
Our monthly data says something more specific and more useful. The term peaked at 1,300 in April and May 2026, then fell back. It is down 23% over three months and up only 14% over the year. Meanwhile Character.AI, the platform at the centre of the research, draws 3,350,000 searches a month. That is a ratio of roughly 3,350 to 1 between using these products and worrying about them. Both halves of that gap matter, and nobody ranking for this term has published either number.
Key takeaways:
- "ai addiction" went from 170 to 1,000 US monthly searches in two years, up 488%, classified as RAPID in the Rising Trends database (data as of July 2026).
- It is not accelerating. The peak was 1,300 in April and May 2026 and the three-month growth column is -23%.
- AI addiction is not a clinical diagnosis. It appears in neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11.
- A Drexel University study of 318 Reddit posts by self-identified 13 to 17 year olds found evidence of all six components associated with behavioural addiction.
- Common Sense Media's national survey found 72% of US teens have used an AI companion, and about one in three find those conversations as satisfying as talking to real friends.
- The fastest-growing worry term is not this one. "ai psychosis" is 18,100 searches and up 83% year over year, eighteen times the size.
Let's get into it. One note first: this piece reports what researchers and surveys found. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a basis for self-diagnosis. If your own use of anything is affecting your sleep, work or relationships, a clinician is the right person to talk to.
The curve
Here is the monthly search volume for "ai addiction" from our database.
The breakout is March 2025. From there it climbs steadily to 880 by late 2025, then steps up to 1,000 in March 2026 and 1,300 in April, the month the Drexel study was published. May holds at 1,300. June and July come back to 1,000.
That is a term responding to a news event, not a term describing a spreading condition. A behaviour genuinely going mainstream in search does not give back 23% in two months.
The company it keeps is where the story gets interesting.
"ai addiction" is the smallest term in its own family. ai girlfriend and "parasocial" each draw 135,000 a month as of July 2026. ai psychosis draws 18,100. And sitting outside this chart entirely, Character.AI draws 3,350,000.
So the honest framing is not that concern is exploding. It is that concern is minuscule relative to use.
Two things stand out. The worry that is growing fastest is the more extreme word: "ai psychosis" is up 83%, against 14% for "ai addiction". And the platform terms are falling, with Character.AI down 33% and "ai companions" down 45%, while "ai companion app" is up 175%. People are moving from the category to specific apps, which is what a maturing market looks like.
What the research actually found
This is where the term earns its keep, because the evidence is better than the search volume suggests.
In April 2026, Drexel University's ETHOS lab published a study analysing 318 Reddit posts written by users identifying themselves as 13 to 17 years old who had posted about dependency on Character.AI. The university's write-up reports that researchers found evidence of all six components associated with behavioural addiction:
| Component | What teens described |
|---|---|
| Conflict | Wanting to keep talking to the bot while feeling bad about how much they used it |
| Salience | A deepening emotional attachment to the bot in place of people |
| Withdrawal | Feeling sad, anxious or incomplete when not interacting |
| Tolerance | Escalating use, needing more to feel satisfied or grounded |
| Relapse | Stopping, then returning days or weeks later |
| Mood modification | Turning to the bot during stress or loneliness for relief |
About a quarter of the posts described using the chatbot for emotional or psychological support. Just over 5% described brainstorming, creative work or entertainment. Some teens reported disrupted sleep, academic struggles and strained relationships.
First author Matt Namvarpour put the distinction carefully: mapping the posts to known components of behavioural addiction "suggests this is more than just frequent or enthusiastic use." His explanation of why it is hard to stop is the sharpest line in the release: "Because of that, stepping away is not just stopping a habit, it can feel like distancing from something meaningful, which makes overreliance harder to recognize and address."
The limitation belongs in the same breath, and the researchers state it themselves: this is a sample of public posts from one platform, written by people already motivated to describe a problem. It establishes that the pattern exists and what it looks like. It does not establish how common it is.
How many people are we talking about?
For prevalence, the better source is a national survey rather than a forum sample.
Common Sense Media's July 2025 survey of US teens found that 72% have used an AI companion at least once and over half use one at least a few times a month. About one in three have used them for social interaction and relationships, including role-play, romantic interaction, emotional support or friendship. About one in three "find conversations with AI companions to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real-life friends."
The same survey carries the counterweight, which most coverage drops. Half of teens distrust AI advice, and 80% say they prioritise real friendships. The organisation nonetheless recommends that no one under 18 use AI companions and is backing legislation to that effect.
Read together, the two studies say something coherent: use is close to universal, a meaningful minority use it for emotional support, a smaller group develops patterns that look like behavioural addiction, and most teens remain sceptical.
Why "addiction" is the wrong word, for now
AI addiction is not a diagnosis. It is not in the DSM-5 and it is not in the ICD-11.
The comparison worth making is gaming disorder, which the World Health Organization did add to ICD-11. The WHO's own explanation is clear that the threshold is high: the pattern must be severe enough to cause significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational or occupational functioning, normally over at least twelve months. That bar exists precisely so that heavy use is not confused with disorder.
Nothing published on AI chatbots has been through that process. The Drexel team did the correct thing, which is to map behaviour onto established criteria and say what they saw, rather than to name a condition. The phrase people type into Google has run ahead of the evidence, which is exactly what our flattening curve shows.
The distinction matters practically. Treating heavy use as a disease invites the wrong response. Teens describing withdrawal and relapse in their own words is a design problem and a loneliness problem before it is a clinical one.
What people say about it themselves
The most honest material on this is not in the studies. It is people describing quitting.
This video from the Sameh doll channel, published July 3, 2026, is a first-person account of stepping away from Character.AI. The Reddit threads read the same way. Titles on r/CharacterAI include "c.ai addiction is real and ruining my life" from October 2024 and "Ways to cure your c.ai addiction" from November 2025, and r/DecidingToBeBetter carries "I have an Ai addiction and need help" from March 2026.
Those are what people say about themselves. They are not evidence of how widespread the problem is, and they should not be read that way. What they do show is that the language of addiction was adopted by users before it was adopted by researchers.
What it means for the people building these products
The design fixes are already specified. The Drexel team proposed usage tracking, emotional check-in prompts, personalised limits, and what they call "a variety of off-ramps for users to easily disengage with the program on their own terms and without a sense of abruptness or finality." None of that is technically hard. All of it cuts engagement, which is the actual obstacle.
Memory and personalisation are the mechanism. The researchers are direct: "Personalization, multimodality and memory set AI companions apart from earlier technologies and make overreliance harder to disentangle from authentic-feeling relationships." Those are the same features every AI agent product is racing to add, which means this is not a companion-app problem for long.
Regulation is being drafted now. A major children's advocacy organisation is backing a ban on under-18 use. Whether or not it passes, age verification and usage disclosure are coming to this category, and the broader mental health market will absorb the consequences either way.
What to watch
Whether the curve resumes. Two months at 1,000 after a 1,300 peak. If it breaks above 1,300 without a new study driving it, the concern is spreading on its own. If it keeps drifting down, April was the story. The live ai addiction trend page is where that resolves.
Whether "ai psychosis" keeps outrunning it. At 18,100 and up 83%, the more extreme term is eighteen times larger and growing faster. We covered that separately in the AI psychosis trend, and the gap between the two terms is a useful measure of how alarmed the public actually is.
Whether a body with authority weighs in. The thing that would change this from a search term into a category is a formal review by the WHO or the APA. Until that happens, the responsible phrasing is the one the researchers used: patterns consistent with behavioural addiction, observed in a sample, needing larger studies.
The plain reading of this data is that the concern is real, well documented in a small study, and much smaller in the public mind than the coverage suggests. A term that peaked in April and fell 23% is not an epidemic. It is a genuine problem that has not yet found its audience.
Want to track a behaviour while it is still a small search curve? Read our guide on how to identify market trends, follow the live ai addiction dashboard page, or see what is breaking out right now on the Rising Trends dashboard.
