Perplexity’s AI Growth Experiment in India

In a bold move to scale its user base, Perplexity partnered with Indian telecom giant Airtel in July 2025 to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription to Airtel’s 360 million customers. This move marked one of the biggest AI growth experiments in recent history, with the potential to create lasting users and revenue after the giveaway ends.

Source: techcrunch.com

The promotion, which ended on January 16, 2026, saw an immediate impact, with Perplexity recording 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month. This momentum persisted well beyond the launch month, with Perplexity recording 56 million downloads during the seven months the offer was available to new users, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period.

Source: techcrunch.com

Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and eventually peaked at 22 million in October. India has long been a massive market for downloads for global technology companies, thanks to its vast population, more than a billion internet subscribers, and relatively low mobile data costs.

The country is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China, with over 700 million users, and has similarly emerged as a major source of users for generative AI services. However, once the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed in January, Perplexity’s downloads fell sharply, with Sensor Tower estimating Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July, down more than 90% from the preceding six months.

Despite this decline in downloads, Perplexity’s users did not disappear quickly. Monthly active users, which peaked at about 22 million in October, stood at nearly 14 million in July, down 37% from that high but still more than five times the about 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025.

Perplexity’s drop in downloads has not been accompanied by a decline in spending. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% from the period when the Airtel offer was available to new users, despite the decline in downloads.

This trend has continued even as the earliest Airtel subscribers have started losing their free Perplexity Pro access. From around July 18 through August 12, Perplexity’s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India, per Sensor Tower, was 9% higher than during the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026.

The increase gives us an early indication that some users may be willing to pay after getting accustomed to the premium service for free. However, it does not confirm that Airtel users themselves are deliberately converting into paying subscribers.

Perplexity’s experiment has since become part of a much broader wager by AI companies in India. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in the country, while Google followed Perplexity with a deal to offer its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users.

This makes Perplexity an early test of whether the strategy can work. Its Airtel deal began months before the similar moves by OpenAI and Google, and its users are among the first large cohort in India to reach the point where free premium AI turns into a product they may have to pay for.

India has already emerged as the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads but remains difficult to monetize. AI companies have been willing to trade near-term revenue for users in this price-conscious market, striving to eventually turn that scale and habit into paying customers.