What the Airtel Deal Actually Was

In July 2025, Airtel partnered with Perplexity to offer a free one-year subscription to its 360 million users in India.

Eligible users received twelve months of complimentary access to Perplexity Pro — a ₹17,000 (~$200 USD) value — at no cost.

The promotion was claimable between **July 17, 2025 and January 17, 2026. **

Airtel's offer was the first in India — and for a time, the most sweeping — to make generative AI a go-to solution bundled into everyday consumer plans. The scale was hard to ignore: Perplexity was effectively handing a premium AI search subscription to a user base roughly the size of the United States.

The Download Surge — and the Cliff

The growth metrics during the promotion period were eye-catching. The partnership drove a 640% year-over-year increase in Perplexity users in India in Q2 2025, alongside a 600% YoY jump in app downloads, reaching 2.8 million downloads in that quarter alone.

But download-driven growth almost always comes with a reckoning. Roughly 50% of Perplexity's downloads since July 2025 came from a single source — the Airtel India partnership — and when that competitive edge evaporated, a sharp decline followed. An analysis circulating in December 2025 put the download drop at as much as 80% once comparable free offers from rivals emerged.

Perplexity formally ended its bundled Pro offer with Airtel in January 2026, alongside OpenAI winding down its free ChatGPT Go access in India — setting the stage for a cleaner test of how many newly acquired users would actually convert to paying subscribers.

The Revenue Story Is Different

Here's where Perplexity's India play diverges from a typical paid-acquisition hangover: India revenue rose approximately 60% after the Airtel offer closed to new users, even as downloads declined. That's the core finding from the original reporting — and it matters enormously.

It suggests that a meaningful cohort of users who received the product for free via Airtel genuinely adopted it, built habits around it, and converted to paid plans when the free ride ended. That's the holy grail of product-led growth, and it's notoriously difficult to achieve in markets where price sensitivity is high.

India still generates a disproportionately small share of AI app revenue — accounting for roughly 1% of in-app purchases even while driving approximately 20% of global GenAI app downloads — which makes Perplexity's revenue uptick in the market all the more notable.

The Broader Race for India's AI Market

Perplexity is not alone in treating India as a strategic priority. Reliance Jio is promoting access to Google's Gemini stack within consumer plans, positioning the assistant as a daily companion for search, productivity, and multimodal tasks.

OpenAI, meanwhile, made its lower-cost ChatGPT Go tier freely available for a year to millions in India, accelerating product-led growth whether or not it was tied to operator billing.

As of January 2026, ChatGPT led India with 180 million monthly active users, followed by Google Gemini at 118 million, Perplexity at 19 million, and Meta AI at 12 million, per Sensor Tower. Perplexity is a distant third by user count — but the revenue-per-retained-user story is where it can differentiate.

CEO Aravind Srinivas has stated that India is one of Perplexity's major growth engines for 2026.

The company targets $656 million ARR by end of 2026, with total funding reaching $1.72 billion following a $200 million raise that closed in June 2026.

What This Means for Founders and Marketers

The Airtel playbook offers a few hard-won lessons:

  • Telecom bundling is a double-edged sword. It delivers instant scale but creates artificial download curves that can panic investors and analysts when they normalize. The real metric to track is post-promotion retention and revenue — not downloads.
  • Free trials work best when the product is genuinely sticky. Perplexity's citation-forward, real-time search answers gave users a workflow they couldn't easily replicate elsewhere — at least until ChatGPT and Gemini folded web search into their core products.
  • India's monetization gap is closeable, but slowly. The 1%-of-revenue / 20%-of-downloads imbalance across the market is structural, not permanent. Perplexity's 60% revenue lift suggests that with the right product, even price-sensitive markets can convert — it just requires patience and a genuine free-to-paid on-ramp, not just a vanity metric play.

For any AI startup trying to crack emerging markets, Perplexity's India story is worth studying closely: the distribution deal got users in the door, but it was product quality that kept them paying.