How We Review
How AI Best Chat Reviews AI Companion Apps
Every review here runs the same way. We open an account, spend at least one long session inside the app, score it against the same five factors, and write a verdict that names who should buy it and who should walk. When the product changes, we go back and test it again.
Sarah has been testing and reviewing AI companion platforms since 2022. She specializes in evaluating user experience, privacy practices, and the real-world performance of AI chatbots.
Our 5-Factor Scoring Rubric
Each AI companion app is scored from 1 to 10 across five factors. The overall score is the weighted average of those five sub-scores, rounded to one decimal.
Chat Quality
How natural, coherent, and on-character the responses feel across a long session, including pacing, repetition, and recovery from off-script prompts.
Personality Depth
How distinct each character feels, how much memory and personalization the platform supports, and whether personas hold up over time.
Visuals
Image quality, art consistency, image generation capability where present, and the overall interface polish.
Value
Free-tier usefulness, paid-tier price relative to feature delta, and whether the product justifies a subscription over time.
Safety
Age gating, content moderation behaviour, privacy posture, refund handling, and how the platform treats sensitive data.
Testing Process
- We sign up like anyone else, on the plan most readers start with: the free tier where one exists, otherwise the cheapest paid tier.
- We run at least one full session per review, 45 to 90 minutes of active chat across several personas.
- We push at refusals and NSFW edges where the product allows them, so you know where the wall sits.
- We check pricing, the refund policy, and any auto-renew traps before publishing.
- We re-test before every refresh of a review and update the dateModified field.
Editorial Independence
AI Best Chat earns money from affiliate partnerships. When you click an outbound link on a review and sign up or subscribe, we may receive a commission from the platform. That commission never changes the score, the verdict, or the ordering of reviews.
We score every product on the same rubric, whether or not we have a commercial relationship with the vendor. If we cannot recommend something, the verdict says so, and the cons sit next to the pros on every page.
We do not accept paid placements, paid scores, or vendor-written copy. Vendors do not see review drafts before publication.
Affiliate Disclosure
This site contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission from purchases or signups made through outbound links on review pages. Outbound commercial links open in a new tab. The commission has no effect on our editorial scoring or our recommendations.