The promotion rapidly expanded Perplexity's reach. Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch estimates the app generated 5.9 million downloads in India during July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month. That single month also surpassed the 5.4 million downloads recorded across the first six months of the year.
Growth continued after the initial surge. During the seven months when Airtel customers could claim the offer, Perplexity generated an estimated 56 million downloads, more than nine times its total during the prior seven-month period. Monthly active users reached 8.9 million in July before peaking at roughly 22 million in October, according to Sensor Tower.
The end of new redemptions produced a very different pattern for downloads. Between February and July, Perplexity recorded about 3.3 million downloads in India, Sensor Tower estimates, representing a decline of more than 90% compared with the previous six months.
Usage, however, has held up better than new installations. Perplexity had nearly 14 million monthly active users in India in July. That was 37% below its October peak but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users it averaged during the first half of 2025.
“While the time-sensitive nature of this promotion would naturally lead to a decline in adoption after the offer period, ongoing usage has remained resilient,” Sensor Tower senior insights analyst Abe Yousef told TechCrunch. He said Perplexity now has “significantly more users” in India than during the six months preceding the promotion.
Revenue data provides another early signal about what happened after the acquisition campaign. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity's Indian in-app purchase and subscription revenue increased roughly 60% between February and mid-August compared with the period when new Airtel users could still redeem the free subscription, despite the sharp reduction in downloads.
The increase has continued as some of the earliest promotional subscriptions expire. From around July 18 through August 12, Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity's average daily in-app purchase revenue in India was 9% above the preceding 30-day period and 27% higher than the average recorded during the first half of 2026.
Those figures suggest some users may be paying for Perplexity after experiencing its premium service, but the available data cannot establish how much of the revenue comes from former Airtel participants. Sensor Tower also cannot determine whether renewals represent deliberate purchasing decisions or users who did not cancel before being charged. That distinction matters because the complimentary subscriptions were configured to renew automatically. Users who did not want to continue with the paid service needed to cancel before their renewal date.
Data from Appfigures similarly indicates that Perplexity's expansion was closely associated with the Airtel promotion rather than a simultaneous increase across competing AI apps. “I compared Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to ensure it wasn’t more appetite for AI, and it wasn’t,” Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli told TechCrunch.
Perplexity averaged roughly 11,200 daily downloads in India during the week before the Airtel offer, according to Appfigures. That figure increased about twentyfold to nearly 223,000 per day in the promotion's first week. Average daily downloads later reached approximately 305,000 between mid-September and mid-October, while downloads for OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude remained broadly steady.
Appfigures' revenue estimates also point to a larger mobile business following the promotion. Perplexity's monthly net mobile revenue in India increased from roughly $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December, then reached $156,000 in July 2026. Across the first seven months of 2026, Appfigures estimates the company generated $878,000 in the country, 16% more than it generated throughout 2025.
Michaeli cautioned that those gains cannot all be attributed to Airtel customers becoming subscribers. The increased exposure created by the promotion could also have brought in paying customers who never received free Pro access.
Perplexity's results are particularly relevant as other AI companies pursue similar strategies in India. OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go offering free for a year in the country in August 2025. Google later offered eligible Reliance Jio customers 18 months of its AI Pro subscription at no charge.
Those initiatives put Perplexity among the earliest large AI subscription promotions in India to reach the stage where users begin moving from free premium access toward potential paid renewals. The results so far show that the Airtel partnership produced a major increase in downloads, left Perplexity with a larger active audience and coincided with higher mobile revenue after new redemptions ended.
What remains unresolved is the most important part of the experiment: how many Airtel customers will intentionally pay for Perplexity Pro after their complimentary year expires. With later groups of users still approaching their renewal dates, the available data provides only an early view of that conversion.
Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of NewsBytes.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
