Candy AI did not exist in August 2023. By August 2026, Semrush estimated the AI companion app was drawing 45.59 million visits a month, and it had appeared on every edition of Andreessen Horowitz’s list of the 100 most-used consumer AI web products since 2024.
Part of the explanation sits in plain view. On the adult affiliate network CrakRevenue, Candy AI offers publishers 40% of every payment a referred customer ever makes, or a flat fee of up to $60 per sale. And an agency in Mohali, India, says it was hired to build the network that collects those commissions, claiming a 60% increase in signups and four times as many affiliate conversions.
The commissions are real and documented, and the trail of tracking links is easy to find. The agency’s story is harder to stand up, and the share of Candy AI’s growth that affiliates actually drove is something nobody outside the company can measure. This investigation separates the two.
Candy AI Was Built by Founders With Marketing Backgrounds
In October 2022, the candy.ai domain was still listed for sale on Afternic. The first archived copy of the app was captured on September 5, 2023, and EverAI’s recruitment pages date the “public release” to that month.
EverAI Limited, registered in Malta under number C107181, operates the service, and subscribers see “EverAI” on their bank statements. A UK company of the same name, incorporated a month before launch and dissolved in October 2025, listed two French nationals living in the UAE, Michael Monin and Thomas Lacroix, as its persons with significant control. Job listings from 2025 name Alexis Soulopoulos as CEO, describing him as a co-founder of Mad Paws Holdings, with Monin as CTO and Lacroix as CMO. Both co-founders are credited with MTK Digital, which the listing says grew from “0->$20m revenue.”
That background shows in the timeline. An “Affiliate” link, pointing to a Google Form for would-be partners, appeared in the app’s sidebar between October 1 and October 15, 2023, within six weeks of launch. Referral links with a ?via= code start appearing in archived pages that November.
The claimed user counts have climbed since, from “22M users” in a March 2025 job listing to “Trusted by 50 million people worldwide” on today’s pricing page. EverAI does not say how it counts a user, or how many of them pay.
An Agency Says It Built Candy AI’s Affiliate Network
In a case study first published in June 2025, Triple Minds called itself “the official SEO and digital marketing team behind Candy.AI.” It says it was hired “To Build an Affiliate Network,” “To Dominate Organic Search Globally,” and “To Post 50 Listings like Top 10 NSFW Chatbot,” and describes affiliate kits, partnerships with YouTube reviewers and Instagram Reels.
What Triple Minds Says It Achieved for Candy AI
The case study’s headline numbers in its own wording, and what each one leaves out.
Source: Triple Minds, Candy AI case study, accessed October 13, 2026. These are the agency’s claims, not Candy AI’s results.
The page has changed
An archived copy from November 2025 claimed listings on “world popular news websites like Entrepreneur, Forbes, TrustPilot, BBC,” an “Affiliate Traffic Breakdown” led by YouTube at 36% and Instagram at 28%, and a testimonial attributed to “Thomas, Founder, Candy.AI.” None of that is on the live page. We found no evidence of the Forbes, Entrepreneur or BBC placements.
The dates do not line up
On its Candy AI clone page, Triple Minds calls itself Candy AI’s “official marketing partner (2022–2024).” Candy AI launched in September 2023, and in October 2022 its domain was still for sale. The same page puts the 60% signup lift at “4 months,” the only timeframe the agency gives anywhere.
A second agency claims the same results
In April 2026, seocircular.com published its own Candy AI case study with the same 60%, 4X, 5M+ and 100+ figures. Its pages use the same Calendly account, Telegram handle and WhatsApp numbers as Triple Minds, and its WhatsApp links open with “Hello Triple Minds.” That case study’s URL now redirects to a general adult-SEO sales page.
The agency sells copies of Candy AI
Triple Minds markets a “Candy AI Clone,” a white-label NSFW chatbot “Starting at $15,000,” alongside clones of DreamGF and OurDream. Being known as the team that scaled Candy AI is part of that pitch.
None of this proves Triple Minds did no work for Candy AI. But neither EverAI nor any third party has confirmed the relationship, and the agency’s account has shifted over time. The case study is best read as a description of the playbook, not as evidence of what it achieved.
Candy AI Pays Up to $60 for Every Referred Sale
Candy AI’s affiliates are paid through at least three channels: in-house programs on FirstPromoter and Everflow, whose terms never publish a rate, and a public offer on CrakRevenue that does. CrakRevenue’s table, updated August 19, 2026, lists a 40% lifetime revenue share and flat fees of $36 or $44 per sale depending on country, plus $60 for CandyShorts, Candy AI’s short-video product.
How Candy AI’s Affiliate Offer Grew
From a sign-up form in the app’s sidebar to tiered flat fees, as archived copies of each page show.
Sources: Internet Archive captures of candy.ai and of CrakRevenue’s Candy AI offer page. The flat fee rose sometime between May and August 2026; rates vary by country, so no single figure applies to every affiliate.
Revenue share is “lifetime-based” and paid on “all referred users’ payments,” which plausibly includes token purchases. Refunded or cancelled transactions earn nothing under the Everflow terms. Affiliates may not bid on Candy AI’s brand in paid search, buy incentivized traffic, or run PR “under our name.” And they are “prohibited from publicly disclosing their commission rates or earnings.”
Which deal should a publisher take?
Candy AI’s monthly plan costs $9.99 for the first month and $13.99 after that; the annual plan is billed at $47.88. Here is what each model pays for a single referred subscriber.
40% Revenue Share Against a $44 Flat Fee, One Subscriber
What a publisher would earn on the subscription alone, by how long a monthly subscriber stays. Bars are scaled to the largest figure.
Our illustration from Candy AI’s list prices on October 13, 2026 and CrakRevenue’s published rates, not a reported payout. It ignores token purchases, refunds and churn, and assumes the publisher qualifies for the rate shown.
A revenue-share affiliate only overtakes the $36 fee if a monthly subscriber stays about seven months, and the $44 fee at about ten. CrakRevenue’s own figures point the same way: $0.52 earned per click on the top flat-fee offer, against $0.04 on revenue share.
That matters for readers. A flat fee rewards getting someone to pay once, not whether they still find the product worth paying for in month three.
Candy AI’s Rates Match the Market Rather Than Beat It
Forty percent recurring is the going rate in AI companions. OurDream advertises up to 40% or $26 to $70 per acquisition, Nectar AI 40% lifetime or up to $40, GirlfriendGPT 40% recurring, and DarLink 45% or $30 per sale on CrakRevenue.
What stands out is the combination: an affiliate channel open within weeks of launch, several programs and networks running side by side, and, if Triple Minds is to be believed, an agency recruiting publishers into them.
It is also a contrast with companies we have covered before. Our investigation into Submagic found affiliates worth about 20% of revenue, a figure its founder disclosed. Cometly’s affiliate launch week came with a cash total from the affiliate platform’s own case study. Candy AI has published nothing comparable, and its terms bar its affiliates from saying what they earn.
Traffic Data Shows Candy AI’s Scale, Not What Caused It
Every figure here is a third-party estimate, not Candy AI’s analytics, and the tools disagree.
How Many People Visit Candy AI, and How They Arrive
Two traffic tools, two different answers on volume, and one channel breakdown.
Sources: Semrush (page updated September 17, 2026) and Similarweb (September 2026). Modeled estimates, not Candy AI’s analytics.
Semrush’s monthly figure and Similarweb’s three-month total cannot both be right. They agree on scale and audience: tens of millions of visits a month, about a third from the United States. Of the visits Similarweb counts as referrals, 82% come from adult websites, across 886 referring sites.
Two cautions. Similarweb’s “affiliate” label is its own classification and covers desktop only. And a referral is not a commission: a site can link without being paid, and a paid affiliate’s reader can come back later by typing the name in. Semrush estimates 135,000 monthly US searches for “candy ai” alone. Some of that demand was plausibly created by affiliates; how much is unknowable from the outside.
The data supports this much: affiliates and adult referrers are a large, observable part of how desktop visitors reach Candy AI. It does not support any claim that affiliates drive most of its traffic or revenue, or that Triple Minds’ work caused a particular jump.
Most Pages Recommending Candy AI Carry Tracking Links
We looked at a sample of pages that recommend Candy AI and followed their links one redirect at a time from the page source, without signing up.
Six Pages Recommending Candy AI, and Where Their Links Go
How each page presents Candy AI, what its outbound link carries, and whether it tells readers.
#1 of 8, “Best Overall.” Links pass through a redirect tagged with a publisher ID and land with an “SEO Article” campaign tag. No disclosure found.
#1 of 9, “best overall.” A /recommends/ page forwards to a tracking domain with an affiliate sub-ID. Discloses affiliate links.
Rated 4.1/5. Sixteen links to a /go/ redirect that lands with a referral code. Disclosure only as a footer link.
“Worth it” with caveats. Tracked link lands with an affiliate campaign tag. Discloses affiliate links.
Positive. A /go/ link passes through a tracker and lands with a referral code. No disclosure found.
Seven “Verified” offers, none with a code. Offer buttons load by script and were not traced. Says it may earn a commission.
Observed October 13, 2026, from each page’s source. A tracking link shows a referral is being measured. It does not show what, if anything, the publisher is paid, or whether a review is accurate.
Five of the six pages route readers through links carrying an affiliate or publisher identifier, and two carry no disclosure we could find. Several still list real drawbacks, such as token costs, paywalled images and voice, and no native app.
Firsthand testing is harder to find. HollywoodLife’s unbylined article says its writer used Candy AI for six weeks. DatingSiteSpot says its ranking rests on public pricing and the feature set. MorningDough leans on what “users consistently report.” On YouTube, one 2026 review with about 13,700 views sends viewers through a short link to a Candy AI review site, with no disclosure in the description.
None of this shows any reviewer is dishonest. It does show that much of what a reader finds when searching for Candy AI was published by someone positioned to earn from their signup, and that readers are not always told.
Affiliates Also Took Candy AI Where It Didn’t Want to Be
In January 2025, Bellingcat and the German outlet STRG_F reported that Candy AI had been promoted on MrDeepFakes, then one of the largest sites for non-consensual deepfake pornography, from mid-December 2024. EverAI told the reporters the promotion came through its affiliate program, that it did not condone deepfakes, and that it had cut ties with the affiliate. The links came down after the reporters asked.
Candy AI’s terms now ban affiliates from placing it next to deepfakes or non-consensual imagery. The episode shows the trade-off: paying anyone who can send a customer is cheap and scales fast, but it puts the brand’s reputation partly in the hands of people it has never met.
Candy AI Built Its Reach on Recommendations It Pays For
The evidence supports this much. Candy AI opened an affiliate channel within six weeks of launch, runs at least three affiliate programs at market rates, and has raised its flat fees over time. Pages recommending it routinely carry tracking links back to it, and third-party tools classify a large share of its desktop visits as affiliate traffic.
It does not tell us what share of Candy AI’s users or revenue came through affiliates; the company has not said, and its affiliates are contractually barred from saying what they earn. Nor does it tell us what Triple Minds actually did, when, or what it achieved.
The broader lesson is about what a recommendation is. Products like Candy AI are hard to judge before paying. Memory, the pace at which tokens run down, image limits and cancellation only become clear after days or weeks of use. Those are exactly the things a page optimized for a first sale has the least reason to test.
That is why firsthand testing matters. When AI Girlfriend Coach paid for a month of Candy AI and kept a running diary, it found that automatic photos and voice notes “quietly ate” its monthly token allowance down to 23, and that the discount banner moved from “63% off” to “70% off” overnight without the price changing.
The same publisher’s September 2026 study of 22 Reddit threads found nine identifiable accounts recommending Candy AI, and flagged eight of them for promotional or commercial signals, such as referral codes or branded accounts. The study is a non-random sample coded by one person, and it says itself that a flag is not proof anyone was paid.
None of this makes affiliate-funded recommendations dishonest by default. Several of the pages we read were frank about Candy AI’s limits. But a reader choosing an AI companion app is mostly reading an ecosystem the vendor pays for. Candy AI did not invent that ecosystem. It built one of the most efficient versions of it, and it belongs alongside the other startups in our Deep Dives that found customers through someone else’s audience rather than paid ads.
