How We Review
How AI Best Chat Reviews AI Companion Apps
Every review on this site follows the same process: hands-on testing across at least one full session, a fixed five-factor scoring rubric, a written verdict that says clearly who the product is for and who should skip it, and a refresh whenever the underlying product changes meaningfully.
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 a normal user, on the same plan most readers would start on (free tier where it exists, otherwise the lowest paid tier).
- We run at least one full session per review, typically 45 to 90 minutes of active chat across multiple personas.
- We test refusal behaviour and NSFW edges where the product allows them, to set realistic expectations.
- We check pricing, refund policy, and any auto-renew traps before publishing.
- We re-test before every meaningful refresh of the review and update the dateModified field accordingly.
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, regardless of whether we have a commercial relationship with the vendor. Products we cannot recommend are clearly flagged in the verdict, and we publish the cons 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. All outbound commercial links are marked rel="sponsored" and open in a new tab. The commission has no effect on our editorial scoring or our recommendations.