Perplexity's Airtel giveaway has stopped producing a flood of fresh downloads in India, but the more useful number is what happened after the free rush cooled.
Perplexity got the thing every consumer AI company says it wants in India: scale. Then the easy part ended. After its free Perplexity Pro offer for Airtel customers closed to new redemptions in January 2026, the app's India download engine slowed hard, while revenue moved the other way, according to Sensor Tower data reported by TechCrunch.
That is the story. Not the download crash by itself. Fewer people are showing up, and Perplexity is still making more money from India than it did before the bundle had time to work.
The deal was huge from the start. Bharti Airtel announced on July 17, 2025 that all 360 million of its customers could claim 12 months of Perplexity Pro at no extra cost through the Airtel Thanks app. Airtel put the value at Rs 17,000 for the year, roughly the same as Perplexity's $200 annual Pro plan. Perplexity's own help center says the promotional offer ended on January 16, 2026.
For a product trying to become a habit, that kind of distribution is difficult to buy any other way. The numbers back that up. TechCrunch reported last July that Perplexity's India downloads had already jumped 600% year over year in the second quarter of 2025, to 2.8 million, before the full Airtel effect had even played out. Monthly active users were up 640% year over year in the same period, though ChatGPT still had the much larger base.
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The Free Year Did Its Job #
Perplexity's promotional run pulled in tens of millions of Indian installs, then stopped accepting new claims. After that, reported downloads fell sharply. That looks ugly if you read the chart like a growth marketer hunting for a single upward line.
Don't do that.
The better question is whether the users who came through Airtel kept enough of the habit to become useful to Perplexity after the free window closed. The answer, so far, is more interesting than the download number. Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch showed Perplexity still holding a far larger India user base than it had before the Airtel deal, even after the post-promotion falloff. Some users tried it once and left. Some kept using it. A smaller group appears to be paying.
That is how free distribution is supposed to work. You don't need every Airtel customer to become a subscriber. You need enough serious users to remain after the crowd has passed through. If Perplexity can keep converting that group, the apparent crash in installs becomes less important than the rise in revenue per active user.
The revenue figure is still small beside Perplexity's global ambitions. The company has been reported at multibillion-dollar valuations, and India mobile revenue in the low six figures a month won't justify that on its own. But India has never been an easy paid-app market. TechCrunch, citing Sensor Tower, reported in February that India generated about 20% of global generative AI app downloads in 2025 while accounting for only about 1% of in-app purchase revenue.
That is the hard part. People will try AI for free. Getting them to pay is a different test.
India Is The Conversion Test #
Perplexity isn't the only company running that test. OpenAI, Google and others have used cheaper plans, student offers and telecom-style distribution to push AI tools into India at scale. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI's free ChatGPT Go access in India had also ended by early 2026, setting up the same basic question: who stays when the offer is gone?
ChatGPT's majority is gone and OpenAI's IPO story just got harder to tell ChatGPT's global audience share fell to 46.4% as of end-May 2026, the first time it has dropped below 50%, per Sensor Tower's State of AI Report. Gemini now holds 27.7% and Claude 10.3%, with OpenAI's Pentagon deal in February triggering a 295% uninstall spike that accelerated the shift. The decline lands at the worst possible moment, just as... - how to price a SaaS product for enterprise - cold email template that gets replies from investors
Perplexity has one advantage in this comparison. Its Airtel deal has a clear before and after. The offer opened on July 17, 2025 and closed to new redemptions on January 16, 2026. That gives you a cleaner read than a campaign that fades slowly or changes terms halfway through.
It also gives you a warning. A download figure can make a strong product look weak if you strip it away from retention and revenue. A 90% fall in installs sounds like a collapse. Put it next to a larger retained user base and rising mobile revenue, and it reads more like a filter. Most people took the free ride. The valuable ones are the users who still open the app when nobody is handing them a Rs 17,000 perk.
Perplexity still has to prove the habit lasts. Airtel's customer base is vast, and even a small paying slice could matter, but the next few months will tell you whether July's revenue bump was the beginning of a paid base or just the afterglow of a large promotion.
For now, Perplexity has shown something more useful than a viral download spike. It has shown that a free AI bundle in India can leave behind paying behavior after the promotion ends. That won't settle the economics of consumer AI, but it gives the rest of the industry a number worth watching. Also read: China lets ByteDance and Tencent import 10,000 Nvidia H200 chips each • From Database to AI Data Platform: OceanBase's Roadmap to Rival Databricks • OpenAI Halted Training After Its Own AI Model Hacked Hugging Face