Google vs. Perplexity fight plays out in India as AI battle intensifies

The push notification arrived quietly one morning in July on Airtel’s bright-red mobile app. The Indian telecom company had a tantalizing offer for its 360 million subscribers: Perplexity Pro, the artificial intelligence-powered search engine, was available free for a year. All they had to do was click on the “Activate” button.

Perplexity’s giveaway, which otherwise costs about $200 a year, came on the heels of an offer from rival Google just days earlier: a free, one-year upgrade to its Google AI Pro suite for every college student in India, with access to the Gemini AI model, the Notebook LLM tool, and an early-access coding co-pilot.

These moves, in the world’s most populous country, are just the most recent in the pitched battle for a piece of the fast-growing market for AI-powered search. Following the launch of ChatGPT and its quick adoption worldwide, big tech firms including Meta, Microsoft, and Google have scrambled to push their own alternatives, even as challengers such as Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Dia have entered the fray to redefine search with generative AI. OpenAI is also preparing to launch its own browser.

With China out of bounds for most Silicon Valley firms, India is both a “high-pressure testing ground” and a key source of training data sets, Payal Arora, a professor of inclusive AI cultures at Utrecht University, told Rest of World.

“Training AI on vast Indian data sets pushes models to handle linguistic diversity, low-resource contexts, and noisy real-world data, making them more robust globally,” she said. “What works in India will scale better everywhere else.”

With more than 700 million internet users, high mobile penetration, robust homegrown digital platforms, and language diversity, India offers a test market like no other country. Unlike China, the country has largely been open to global tech companies, and is one of the biggest markets in the world for Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube. India’s domestic AI market is projected to more than triple to $17 billion by 2027, making it one of the fastest-growing globally, according to a recent report from Boston Consulting Group.

Naturally, the country is a battleground for AI search. The global market is worth about $44 billion, and is forecast to more than double to $109 billion by 2032, according to research firm Coherent Market Insights. ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude were the most frequented AI search models, with traffic surging in the past year, according to research compiled by OneLittleWeb, a search optimization firm. Web traffic to search engines declined slightly, but remains far ahead of AI chatbots, it showed.

Google has an edge in India, where Android has the lion’s share of the smartphone market, and many phones come with Google pre-installed. Google has not said how many users signed up for its free plan. Perplexity quickly became the number one app on Apple’s App Store in India, overtaking ChatGPT in daily downloads.

“Perplexity usage in India growing like [fire emoji]. The adoption is clear proof that search has changed forever,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on LinkedIn days after announcing the Airtel partnership.

Perplexity has introduced similar offers for Samsung Galaxy users in the U.S., and student users of identity verification company SheerID worldwide. For the company, it’s all about increasing adoption quickly, Nikhil Pahwa, founder of digital policy publication MediaNama, told Rest of World.

Perplexity “isn’t the household name that Google’s Gemini is or ChatGPT has become, nor does it have the distribution of a Meta AI on WhatsApp,” he said. “Onboarding new users to Pro via Airtel should not only help improve stickiness and usage, but more importantly, ensure Perplexity remains in the game and can raise more money.” Pahwa pointed out that its valuation had increased after launching the India offer.

India, which has among the cheapest mobile data costs in the world, has some experience with free internet giveaways. Facebook launched its Free Basics plan in India and other developing countries in 2015, offering a limited set of internet services. The backlash in India was swift and fierce. Facebook had become a private gatekeeper to the internet, activist groups said. The program failed to meet linguistic requirements, offered little local content, and collected users’ data — a new form of digital colonialism, one activist group said. India’s telecom authority banned the program less than a year later for violating net neutrality principles.

Just months later, India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched a “welcome offer” on his mobile network, Reliance Jio, giving every subscriber free unlimited 4G data, voice calls, and text messages for nearly six months. The result: Jio signed up 50 million users in a little over two months, helping catapult the company to the number one position.  

With AI, India is a prized market for Big Tech. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has said AI adoption in India is “amazing to watch,” and has announced a slew of investments in the country. The heads of Perplexity, Google, and Microsoft — all from India — have visited the country or met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently, and pledged investments and other commitments.

India may also be seeking to counter the growing influence of Chinese tech in the country. India banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese-owned apps in 2020, citing concerns about national security and data privacy. It remains one of the top markets for DeepSeek, which has been banned on government devices in several countries including South Korea, Australia, and Italy.

But becoming one of the biggest markets for the likes of ChatGPT, Meta AI, and potentially Perplexity and Gemini also means India’s own ambition of technological sovereignty is hobbled, Karthik Nachiappan, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore, told Rest of World.

“The long-term objective is to build its technology stack — hardware, software, and applications,” he said. “The longer this takes, given the  dominance of U.S. or Western AI firms and models, it will mean the delay of completely owning and deploying its own stack. This could affect domestic innovation.”

For the millions of Indian users who signed up for the freebies, the choice is far more simple: AI search or traditional search? And which AI search engine will it be?

For Rufaid Sideeq, a biology major at Delhi University, the free upgrade to Google’s AI suite solved his biggest frustration with traditional search: the endless clicking before getting to a reliable answer. Gemini is “less time-consuming,” he told Rest of World.

The “single greatest advantage of Gemini is its ability to code and perform advanced math calculations,” said Sideeq, who does not use Perplexity.

Sideeq knows that Google is offering the service for free “to attract as many students as they can … until it becomes their preferred AI, as college students use AI a lot.”

Asked if he would pay for the service when the plan ends, he said, “I might pay. I’m not sure.”