AI use in dating jumped 333% in a year. Here's what people actually want it to do
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Every year, Match funds a survey of thousands of single Americans through researchers at the Kinsey Institute, and it's usually a grab bag of stats about sex, loneliness and what Gen Z thinks of situationships. This year's edition buried a genuinely sharp data point in the middle of it: AI use in dating didn't creep up, it quadrupled.
The number
The 14th annual Singles in America study, run by Dynata with the Kinsey Institute and released in June 2025, surveyed 5,001 U.S. singles ages 18 to 98. It found that 26% of singles now use AI to enhance their dating lives, up from roughly 6% in the prior wave of the same study, a jump Match itself flagged as a 333% year-over-year increase. Among Gen Z specifically, adoption is close to 50%.
That's a fast climb for any consumer habit, let alone one this personal. But the more interesting finding sits one line down from the topline number: what people actually want the AI to do.
Not a chatbot boyfriend
If you assumed the growth was driven by people wanting an AI to flirt on their behalf, the data doesn't back that up. The two most-requested uses in the survey were: 44% of all singles want AI to help filter and screen matches, and 40% want help writing their dating profile. Both of those are front-loaded, low-stakes tasks. Neither one touches an actual conversation with an actual person.
That distinction matters. Sorting through a stack of profiles and staring at a blank bio field are the two most tedious parts of using a dating app, and they're also the parts that have nothing to do with chemistry. Handing them off to a tool doesn't ask AI to fake a connection, it just clears the busywork out of the way before a real one has a chance to happen. Dr. Amanda Gesselman, Match's Director of Sex and Relationship Science, put it this way in the release: "AI isn't replacing intimacy, it's giving singles an edge. For a generation overwhelmed by options, tools that bring clarity and efficiency are more than welcome."
Why this tracks with what daters already complain about
None of this happens in a vacuum. It lines up with a complaint that's been showing up across other dating-app research for years: choice overload. When a match rate sits in the low single digits and a bio is the only thing standing between a swipe and a match, the actual friction isn't a shortage of romantic instinct, it's the mechanical overhead of triage. Anything that promises to cut that overhead down, even a little, will find takers fast, and 26% in a single wave suggests it already has.
It's also a useful gut check on where AI is (and isn't) actually landing in people's dating lives right now. The louder cultural conversation is about AI companions and chatbot relationships. The actual survey data says most daters trying AI right now are using it for something far more mundane: help narrowing a list and help writing a paragraph about themselves.
The bigger story here isn't that AI is coming for dating. It's that singles are already using it, in large and fast-growing numbers, for the two most boring parts of the process. That's a far less dramatic headline than "AI girlfriend," but it's the one the numbers actually support.