It’s been exactly one year and the verdict is in. Did Perplexity achieve what it wanted with the Airtel deal? Not only did it fail to grow with the industry, it lost existing users while the industry doubled.
In June 2025, Perplexity had 3.8 million monthly active users in India. Then the Airtel bundle launched in July, which offered free Pro, worth ₹17,000, for Airtel’s 360 million subscribers.
By October, India MAUs hit 22 million. India became 42% of Perplexity’s global user base and its largest market by a wide margin.
Here’s what happened next.
Nov 2025: 19 million. Jun 2026: ~15.5 million.
Down 30% from peak. I see this as a product story, not a promo story. The Airtel claim window stayed open until January, and everyone who claimed kept free Pro for a full year. The decline began in November itself. Users weren’t churning because the free ride ended. They had live, unexpired Pro subscriptions. They just stopped opening the app.
If you zoom out, over the same 12 months, ChatGPT’s India MAUs went from ~95 million to ~208 million. Gemini went from ~73 million to ~136 million. Perplexity’s share of the three peaked at 8.6% in October and sits at ~4.3% today.
Why?
Perplexity’s wedge was better search, and Google’s AI Mode has improved so much that the wedge kept shrinking before it finally disappeared. ChatGPT and Gemini are also better horizontal consumer products.
Perplexity itself moved on. Through this period, it pivoted from search to AI agents with Perplexity Computer.
So ends India’s first telco-AI distribution experiment. Airtel delivered exactly what a distribution partner should. Don’t blame Indian users either, for not building a habit around a product its own maker had moved on from. This one is on Perplexity. It fumbled the Airtel boost.
It probably doesn’t mind. Post-pivot, the business looks stronger, and nobody in SF was betting that Airtel’s casual search users would convert to an enterprise agent product.