The Companion Report
Independent reporting on AI companion apps.
Overview
Reviews, original research, and honest reporting on the AI companion apps people are actually using — an editorial site built on Astro for speed and a content model built for long-form research.
The AI companion space is full of affiliate content dressed as review journalism. The Companion Report is structured as an editorial product: hands-on testing, disclosed methodology, and research pieces that stand on their own.
Built on Astro so that a content-heavy site still ships almost no JavaScript — the whole site is static HTML with islands only where interactivity earns its cost.
The content model separates reviews, research, and news, each with its own schema markup and its own update cadence.
Where the effort went
The interesting part of The Companion Report was never the page templates. It was architecture at static-first, and getting the underlying model right so the product stays correct as it grows. That is the part we care about, and it is the part that determines whether something like this is still useful in a year.
It runs on infrastructure the owner controls — source in GitHub, deployment on Railway, DNS and CDN on Cloudflare — with no proprietary platform in the middle.