Perplexity’s India Playbook: Move Fast, Go Wide, Be Useful
If you’ve felt a sudden surge of “Perplexity Pro free for a year” banners in your timeline, you’re not imagining it. In July, Bharti Airtel said all 360 million of its customers could claim a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription—normal sticker price ₹17,000—via the Airtel Thanks app. That’s not growth hacking; that’s a distribution nuke. When a telco pipes your product into a third of the country, daily active users stop being a vanity metric and start looking like infrastructure.
The bet seems to be working. In a fresh interview, Aravind Srinivas said India has become Perplexity’s largest user base, and he even floated the idea of a local investment fund to lean into the ecosystem. Translation: this isn’t a tourist visit; they’re renting an apartment and meeting the neighbours.
The Google-Sized Elephant
You can’t tell this story without the G-word. Google still commands an almost gravitational pull over search behavior, but the ground is shifting under the old model. Srinivas has been unusually blunt that Perplexity is here to compete with Google, not coexist. And now the company is attacking not only the query page but the gateway itself with Comet, its AI-native browser that launched with a clear “rival Google” framing. Think fewer blue links, more finished answers and workflows—less spelunking, more getting things done.
Perplexity’s challenge is part idealism, part tactic. Idealism: make answers verifiable and transparent (citations by default). Tactic: if you can become the habit for “serious queries,” you chip away at Google’s strongest moat—default behavior. Meanwhile, global coverage notes India is ground zero for this AI search land grab, with both incumbents and challengers dangling free or cheap premium plans to win mindshare.
Why India, Why Now?
Because India is the ultimate stress test. If your AI can handle linguistic diversity, flaky bandwidth, and noisy real-world data, it’ll probably excel anywhere. Also, because the numbers are insane: app downloads and usage hours are massive, even if consumer spend is relatively low. That’s why “free Pro” promos are smart here—the market pays with attention today and long-term loyalty tomorrow.
Two more strategic reasons:
- Zero-friction onboarding at scale — Airtel’s tie-in collapses the trial barrier for hundreds of millions. Getting users to taste your Pro features is the most honest kind of marketing.
- Owning the starting point — If Comet becomes the default “new tab” for students, coders, founders, and researchers, then Google’s dominance starts to look less inevitable and more historical. Early Indian coverage framed Comet explicitly as a Google rival—that meme matters.
But Is Google Really Vulnerable?
Short answer: Google isn’t crumbling, but it is being forced to adapt. AI-driven search is changing the UX expectation from “ten blue links” to “coherent, cited answers.” India is the A/B test at national scale. Reporting over the past month captured the knife-fight dynamic clearly: both sides offering premium AI tools free to win share, with Perplexity even hitting #1 on the App Store in India for a stint. None of this proves Google is losing; it does prove Google is working to keep you.
What Perplexity Still Has to Prove
Let’s be adults about this. A few big open questions remain:
- Monetisation beyond promos: Free Pro via Airtel is incredible for adoption; the conversion story comes later. India’s consumer spend on subscriptions is improving, not solved.
- Trust at scale: “Grounded answers with citations” is Perplexity’s calling card. Keeping that crisp when you’re serving tens of millions of Indian queries across languages and contexts is a non-trivial engineering and product challenge.
- Browser stickiness: Launching an AI browser is one thing; making it your default on day 100 is another. Chrome’s incumbency is legendary. Comet must earn its keep with tangible time savings, not just AI glitter. Early coverage lists summarisation, task automation, and an AI sidebar—useful, but the proof is in weekly active retention.
The Takeaway (for Indian users)
If you live on the internet (you do), this is the rare moment you can upgrade your default without paying for the privilege. Grab the Airtel Pro offer if you’re eligible, kick the tyres on Comet, and see where Perplexity genuinely shortens your work. Worst case, you go back to old habits. Best case, you discover a faster path from question to clarity—and in the process, you nudge the biggest player in tech to keep earning your clicks.
Notes: All factual claims are sourced from recent reporting/interviews and official releases. Where numbers or timelines aren’t publicly verified, they are not asserted here as fact.