Match Group's new survey of 1,000 U.S. singles aged 18 to 39 found that 47% hold a negative view of AI's use in romantic contexts, with 40% saying they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app. Among women aged 18 to 24, that refusal rate climbs to 51%. The findings land as every major dating platform — including Match's own Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid — pours money into AI features.
The data complicates the industry's current direction. Bumble has introduced an AI dating assistant named Bee. Tinder is spending so heavily on AI tooling that it has slowed its hiring. Hinge's former CEO stepped down last year to launch an AI-focused dating app from scratch. The bet across the sector is that generative AI will rebuild a category whose user growth has stalled.
Match's own framing of the results is that the resistance is targeted, not universal. 64% of respondents said they could see how AI might help them in their dating journey — through profile assistance, photo selection, or conversation prompts. The line singles are drawing is between AI as a coach and AI as a partner or proxy.
Key facts
- 01Match Group surveyed 1,000 U.S. singles aged 18–39 and found 47% hold a negative view of AI's use in romantic contexts.
- 0240% of singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app; that rises to 51% among women aged 18–24.
- 03Only 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds reported using a companion app in the last three months, and roughly a third of those sought genuine connection.
- 04Despite the wariness, 64% of respondents said they could see how AI might help them in their dating journey.
- 05Match owns Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid; Tinder has slowed hiring to fund AI tool development.
Usage of AI companion apps remains low even in the demographic most associated with them. Only 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they had used a companion app over the last three months, and about a third of that group said they were seeking genuine connections with the chatbots rather than entertainment or curiosity. That puts the share of young adults actively trying to bond with an AI companion in the low single digits.
Match summarized the survey response in a blog post accompanying the release.
“Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but hands off for the human parts”— Match Group, company blog post
The Match Group portfolio sits at the center of this tension. Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid all rely on engagement-driven business models, and AI features that help users write better openers or polish a bio are a defensible product investment. AI features that replace the human counterpart on the other end of the conversation are not — at least according to the company's own customers.
Match elaborated on the distinction in the same post.
“Yes, they'll use it to help them punch up a profile or for help figuring out what to say when a conversation goes quiet, but the actual connection is still theirs to create.”— Match Group, company blog post
That positioning matters for Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who has publicly suggested a future in which users deploy personal bots to date other users' bots and surface compatible humans afterward. The 40% refusal figure — and the 51% among the youngest women, the demographic most courted by dating apps — suggests that vision is several product cycles ahead of what the market will tolerate.
There is a definitional caveat worth keeping in mind. Every major dating app has used matching algorithms for more than a decade; the negative sentiment in the survey is directed at generative AI features layered on top of that, not at the underlying recommendation systems users have long accepted without thinking about them. The distinction users are making is about visibility and authenticity, not about machine learning in the abstract.
For Match Group, the survey is a useful piece of cover. It justifies continued investment in AI features that assist users while giving the company a data-backed reason to avoid the riskier companion-bot territory that competitors and investors keep floating. It also reframes the AI dating debate around a specific question — where does the human stop and the model start — that Match is now publicly answering on the side of its users.
The broader signal for AI product teams is that consumer tolerance for AI is highly context-dependent, and dating is one of the sharpest contexts yet measured. A 47% negative-sentiment reading on AI in romance is not a referendum on the technology — 64% of the same group said AI could help them date. It is a referendum on where AI is allowed to sit in the workflow. The companies that thrive in this category will be the ones that read that line correctly, and the ones that build personal-bot-to-personal-bot matchmaking are likely to find the market Match just measured isn't there yet.
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