The longest-running App Store ad in the entire AI companion category is written in English and runs in ten EU markets that do not speak English first. Character AI's "Make Your Own Chatbot on c.ai" has held the same en-GB line across Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Sweden for a full 365-day window, and it was still live at the close of our pull on 11 July 2026. One creative, one language, ten storefronts, one year. No translation anywhere.
That single fact cuts against the reflex most founders bring to the EU: translate everything or lose the market. So we pulled the whole category from Apple's public Ad Repository (the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires) to see whether the apps that stick with their ads actually localize them. The three anchors are Character AI, Replika, and the rising challenger PolyBuzz. Every ad below runs in one placement, App Store search results, the slot after a query. None of these apps buy browse or Today-tab placements.
Character AI does not translate at all
Character AI ran four distinct creatives across the whole year, 232 ad records in total. Its top creative is that untranslated English line running the full window in all ten countries. A second, near-identical "Make Your Own Chatbot on c.ai" record also ran 365 days across the same ten markets (last seen 2026-07-10). The other two creatives ran 81 and 80 days in autumn 2025, same headline, then stopped.
So the category's longevity champion holds one English message across a full year in ten non-English-first markets and barely tests around it. If a single language were bleeding conversions in Poland or Romania or Sweden, an account this disciplined would have swapped it out months ago. It did not.
Replika does translate, and keeps the translations running
Replika tells a different story. Seven distinct creatives, 226 records, and five of them past 200 days live. Its long-runners split by language:
- "Always here to listen and talk" ran 365 days, localized into German (de-DE) and Spanish (es-ES), in Austria and Spain, still live to 2026-06-24.
- "Avatar chatbot character talk" ran 365 days in English (en-GB) across four countries (AT, EE, FI, HR).
- "Talk with AI companion" ran 248 days in English across five countries (AT, EE, ES, FI, HR), still live to 2026-06-24.
- A second "Always here to listen and talk" ran 246 days, again in German and Spanish.
- A second "Talk with AI companion" ran 227 days in English.
On top of those held winners, Replika opened a fresh angle, "Someone you'll love to talk to," first seen 2026-06-22 and running 19 days so far in German, English, and Spanish across five countries.
The pattern is clear. Replika runs some ads in English and translates others into German and Spanish, and both the English and the localized versions survive past 200 days. Translation is worth it for this account, but so is English. The deciding factor is the message and the market, not a blanket rule.
PolyBuzz picked one language and one country
PolyBuzz is the newest of the three. Two creatives with the same copy, 26 records total. Its live ad, "Chatten mit KI Chatbot," is German only (de-DE), Germany only, first seen 2026-04-05 and running 97 days, still live at 11 July 2026. A rising app that chose exactly one market and wrote for it in the local language, then held it.
So do you need to translate your App Store ads for the EU?
The honest answer from this data is that it depends on how far past your winner you are. The category leader by longevity, Character AI, does not translate and holds one English line across ten markets for a year. The app with the deepest stable of survivors, Replika, does translate, and its German and Spanish ads run just as long as its English ones. PolyBuzz, still early and focused on a single country, wrote in that country's language from day one.
For a solo founder, that shapes a sequence. Before you have found a winner, a single well-written English creative can carry several EU storefronts at once, cheaper to run and faster to read. Character AI proves English can hold for a year without translation. Once you have a proven hook and the budget to keep more ads alive, translation earns its place, and the markets to translate into first are the ones these apps already translate into: German and Spanish. Localization is a step you take after you have something worth localizing, not a tax you pay on day one.
See any advertiser's ads yourself
You can read Character AI's live EU creatives, or Replika's, or any advertiser's, the same way we just did. Run a free scan at recao.app. No signup. You get the advertiser's live App Store ads ranked by how long each has run, with the language and countries for each, so the longest-lived survivors sit at the top.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), across EU storefronts, data window ending 11 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. We invented no numbers beyond what the repository reports. Refreshed monthly.